Last Names

We had fun at our last book group meeting, after the book talk was over, discussing last names. We don't know each other's maiden names, so it was a revelation to hear everyone's past identity.

Several, including myself, had German former names. German immigrants were the single largest group to arrive in the US starting in the 1840s, and lots ended up in the 21st century, as I did, here in Santa Fe. 

But the German name that had us puzzling was C's. Her last name was Eichelberger, a very German sounding name don't you think? 

C is Black. She had us laughing with her tales of growing up African American in New York with a name like that. There were the occasions, like a job interview, where surprises occurred when she showed up. Clearly they were expecting, um, someone else.

She doesn't know the source of the name. As Henry Louis Gates demonstrates so compellingly in Finding Your Roots, almost 100% of African Americans have some white ancestry somewhere. And almost all Black guests on his show who had enslaved ancestors probably took a slave owner's last name.

So either a Black woman in C's ancestry married a German or Yiddish immigrant way back, or an ancestor was owned by a German plantation master. Or maybe something else entirely. 

Who knows -- eichel in German means acorn, and maybe a census taker in the 1800s, recently off the boat from Bavaria and bewildered by American race categories, saw a brown acorn-colored person and thought, "jah, hier ist eine eichel", and wrote down Eichelberger. 

I wish C could have Henry Louis Gates do her ancestry investigation and find her roots.

C got married and took a very common last name that it seems almost half the Black population has. She said that solved a lot of things. 

It shouldn't, but it did.