Some German towns and villages have names ending in -heim meaning home-dorf meaning village Some of your family surnames with these suffixes may include a clue to an ancestral village of long ago.

Common german last name endings. It possibly means ploughed region or marshy region in Old High German. Derived from the name of the region of Brabant in the Netherlands and Belgium. Names ending in -sen as opposed to -son including Hansen Jansen or Petersen may indicate northern German coastal regions or Scandinavia.

Most Popular German Last Names on. Find out how surnames are ranked in popularity how many people in the United States of America bear a particular name and how the statistics change between 1990 and 2000 US Censuses. Common German surnames ending with the following suffixes are indicators of occupational names.

A last name could be what you would call a farm name. The endings burg and thal are usually place name endings and suggest a place of origin long ago. Use the list below to find your last name and learn about its meaning and origins.

Hinrich Bur r mann or Suhrbier. Occupational name for a weaver. If his wife inherited a farm he might change his name to her maiden name.

Another indicator of North German names is a single vowel instead of a diphthong. Most German surnames derive either from archaic professions such as Schmidt Müller. A famous bearer of this surname was the German composer Johannes Brahms 1833-1897.

But in certain settlement areas these endings could also refer to Swedish and Russian Jewish backgrounds. Mann as in Hoffmann denoted that this was man of a farm hoff and thus a farmer er as in Schafer was one who worked with sheep schaf sheep a shepherd. Austen B German Surnames.