Titel: Bobbe surname.
Skrivet av: Niclas Rosenbalck skrivet 2001-10-07, 18:36
The name Bobbe is probably not a surname in a modern form. In the medieval times farmers had those names, in Sweden called tillnamn (sort of surname associated to a person or some generations, sometimes even on the mothers side (cf the wellknown family of Sture); those names were associated with a skill or behavior etc - ex. tailor = skräddare, long = lång). Some of these names later became family-names in the 16th- 17th century (mostly when a person changed his social class, a farmerboy became a priest (ex. the priestfamily of Krook/Krok etc). In the beginning of the 18th century most of the swedish farmers didn´t use this surnames anymore, and simply was called with patronymikon (son-names). The name Bobbe is probably a germanic word and describes something with the person Jons appearance or somthing with some of his very near ancestors appearance or behaviour. This progress of familynames seems to be the same all over northern Europe (cf how the surnames of England was given to a person in the medievial time) but then took different ways in the 16th and 17th century. The question still remains, what does bobbe means in old germanic language? The word seems to, according to information above, be connected even with placesnames in Germany, but the man Jon Bobbe in Älghult parish is certainly not of an exotic extraction from abroad. It´s a very linguistic interesting question.