New Dictionary Of American Family Names

by Elsdon C. Smith

A compilation of derivations for thousands of American family names from all parts of the world

Hardcover

First published June 22, 1988

Reviews

[Michelle]

I was inspired to purchase the book from JRR Tolkien's said use of the English Dialect Dictionary for several of his characters’ names, most notably Baggins and Bag End, where it is said to have had similar origins with the word cul-de-sac. I looked into a more recent copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland and thought it would have been fun to have been perusing Oxford's multi-volume set, though I imagine many of the surnames would have been lost to us in the US. So I opted, not only for something more economical, but also with a research base done in America, choosing instead the New Dictionary of American Family Names. It was written by Elsdon Smith, a successful attorney and passionate onomastician, who was a guiding force behind the founding of the American Name Society (ANS) established in 1951. And while the work may no longer be comprehensive for the standards of today (such as the information from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, or Indigenous Nations), for what it is, and what it was intended to be, it was well researched. You could tell crafting the book was a labor of love, and cherished, no matter how little or how small the available resources had been.