Jada Cash, age 11, of Gastonia, N.C., for her question:
HOW DID PEOPLE GET THEIR NAMES?
Since the beginning of history, almost every person has had a name. It seems that names have always been needed for identification purposes.
About 2852 B.C., Emperor Fushi in China decreed that each person was to have three names. The family name, placed first, came from one of the 438 words in the Chinese sacred poem called "Po Chia Hsing." Second was a generation name adopted by each family and this was followed by an individual name, called a milk name.
Today most first names, called common given names or Christian names, come from Hebrew, Greek, Latin or from one of the Teutonic languages.
Hebrew names taken from the Bible have provided the most important source of first names. The most common boy's name is John, which means "gracious gift of God." The most common girl's name is Mary, which means "bitter."
In early times in the Western world most people had only one name. Nobles then adopted family names to set them apart from the common people in about the 1200s. As a family name became the mark of a gentleman, so the common people began to adopt the practice too.
The crusaders carried the custom of family names from Italy to other countries of Western Europe.
Historians can't come up with simple classifications of family names because of the corruption and changes in spelling and pronunciation. The same name, for example, was often spelled a number of different ways.
Family names have come down through the years in a number of ways. Often they came from a person's surroundings or job. Common job names include Baker, Carpenter, Cook and Miller.
If a man lived near or on a hill, he might have been called Mr. Maki in Finland, Mr. Depew or Mr. Dumount in France, Mr. Zola in Italy, Mr. Jurek in Poland and Mr. Hill in England.
Other common "location" names include Ford, Stone, Book, Wood and Lake.
Many people took surnames from their father's given name. Almost every language has a prefix meaning "son of" including the Irish names starting with 0', German names ending in sohn or son, Scandinavian names ending in sen and Russian and Serbian names ending in ovitch.
The son of John became Johnson or Jackson in England: Johns or Jones in Wales; Jensen, Jansen or Hansen in Denmark; Jonsson and Johanson in Sweden; MacEoin in Ireland; and Ivanov in Russia and Bulgaria.
S ome family names were taken from towns, such as Middleton or Kronenberg. And many English place names may be recognized by such endings as ham, thorp, ton, wic and worth, all meaning a homestead or dwelling.