THE NIEUWENHUIS family who emigrated to America ended up spelling their name Newhouse. Made sense, just like the Kuiper family that eventually called themselves Cooper, Molenaar became Miller and Jansen became Jones or Johnson. Happened everywhere, left and right. Timmerman turned into Carpenter, Willems became Williams and Oberink became O’Brink. Smit morphed into Smith.
That’s an interesting one, because blacksmith was a common and necessary profession. So, it weren’t only Dutch families that in America became Smith, but also German families Schmidt, French people named Ferrier, Italian Ferraro’s, Mexicans named Herrero and Hungarians who were originally Kovacs. That is, if they were among the early immigrants. Germans, Irish and Italians did not usually arrive until the mid-nineteenth century. Often they kept their original name. This was also true for the second wave of Dutch folks. Early immigrants often assimilated their name: e.g., Van der Donck became Onderdonk. But later arrivals often clustered with other Dutch people, which is why families like Muilenburg (Boeing’s previous CEO) and Huizenga (America’s largest garbage collector) in Orange City, Iowa kept their names.
IT APPLIED to the Irish as well, but they already used English spellings, therefore Kennedy simply remained Kennedy – even though there was initially nothing ordinary about that name. Kennedy is an old Gaelic word, and it means ugly head. You look surprised now, but here we have the origin of why we use surnames in the first place. We call a tree a tree and a mountain is a mountain, but only so that we can distinguish between the two. Everyone in that Irish village knew who you were talking about when you mentioned Kennedy. It was that man with the odd head, an efficient way of communicating. For convenience, you would also call his wife and children Kennedy.
They did the same in Russia. A fat guy was called a tolstoy there, therefore his family went by Tolstoy, big, fat. Someone in Italy with bad nails had mal chiavelli, hence he became Machiavelli. It’s how they did it in ancient Rome. You called a guy with a wart on his nose a cicero, a chickpea, which down the road in no way affected the popularity of Mr. Cicero. It was no different among British emigrants to America. The guy who was once caught urinating in public was called Goldwater for the rest of his life, which these days is a perfectly decent name.
YOU WONDER if this can be true. Recommended reading: Bill Brysson’s The Mother Tongue, and Yvette Hoytink’s study of Dutch names in America. Early emigrants by the name of Gerritsen eventually became Garrison, she reminds us, Bakker became Baker, Konings became King, and Brusse became Bruce. The same applies to first names: Evert became Everett, Aaltje Alice, Geesje Jessie, and Leendert became Leonard or, short, Leo. Kamp- in your last name usually became Camp-. There is a Dutch immigrant family from Drenthe named Kamping, which is now Camping. Not Campbell, that’s old English, they didn’t come from Amsterdam. A campbell was a crooked mouth.
The Campbell family line started with someone with an ugly duck face.
