Titel: Malmstrom name origin
Skrivet av: Ingela Martenius skrivet 2010-01-24, 00:11
Jim,
I'm not entirely sure what you mean:
1/ Your ancestor's name was Malmström when he emigrated and it was changed in 1900 to Malstrom. Comment: No family was always called by a burgher name. A name such as Malmström wouldn't have been used at all until the 17th century, and then only by very few people (when the House of Nobility was founded in 1628 they had to force noble families to start using family names). Burgher names were used a little more in the 18th century - but it was only a few years ago (yes!) that the number of proper family names exceeded the number of patronymic-derived names (Andersson, Eriksson etc are properly speaking patronymics that are used as family names). It was quite common for emigrants' names to change a little; in my own family it took just about a decade living in Chicago to go from Hamnqvist to Hamqvist.
2/ Your ancestor emigrated with a patronymic and didn't change his name until 1900 when he started calling himself Malmstrom (or Malstrom?). Comment: Many emigrants changed names right before emigrating, a few changed during the voyage, many changed right after immigrating - and some waited for years before changing names. The odd thing is that we often think they changed to something Anglified but quite often they changed to things like Åström though they would have done better with a name like e.g. Holmberg.