Is the 12th to 14th surnames, Fitz______, the same for male and female siblings?

Question

I am confused! Males of the early second millennium often carry the surname, Fitz(father's name). I find WikiTree lists some of their their female siblings with the same surname, but others with the surname of their father. Which is Correct? Does Fitz = "son of" or does it = "child of?" If the former the father's surname would seem appropriate, but if the latter the surname should be the same as any male sibling.

Answer 1

I do understand your confusion, although this link seems to suggest the relevance to the male heir!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitz

Answer 2

Surnames in the modern sense hadn't been invented.  Genealogists make them up for convenience, but there's no fixed convention on how to do it.

Comments

Convenience, yes. But also because all genealogy databases (including Wikitree) require a surname for organization and retrieval. My assumption of Fitz being "son of" has been supported. The real question, however, is what to do with women? We still need some kind of surname, and for Wikitree we should have a consistent policy. Should they be given a brother's surname, or the father's, or something else?

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It seems to be used both ways.

I have been looking at a lot of FitzWarins in that period.

A very small number of them actually have a father named Warin or Waryn.

Most of them are just called FitzWarin because their father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were called FitzWarin.

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Robert in my humble opinion databases do not need to work like 20th century phone books anymore. For example there is this thing called Google (and its various competitors). This is much easier to use while working on Wikitree than Wikitree's own search function.

I know you are giving the Wikitree policy and I try to follow it, but in my opinion one day Wikitree is going to have to face up to the fact that the policy is not working in the medieval profiles. If someone were to try to enforce it, that would be a disaster. I think the way it is working now, editors are allowing families to occasionally have surname changes, despite the policy. Without some flexibility we would have insanity.

For example if we prove all the links one day between the different Giffard families, should we re-label Sir William the Marshall to be William Giffard (his grandfather's surname), or should we call all the Giffards (a very big family in its own right) Marshalls just because of the branch who were actually known that way?

Answer 3

Just to add to what RJ says, surnames start to appear in this period and were common by the end of it. It is not always clear when a second name was a heritable surname, but in fact cases where daughters were called "Fitz" (son) or where men who were the son of a Richard were called FitzHugh (or something other than their father's name) are the ones where it is clear. Sir William Marshall's father, for example, is posited by historians to be the first one in his family to treat "the Marshall" as a surname rather than a personal title.

There is a practical problem if we want to truly avoid anachronism because historians are no always sure which second names are seen as surnames, but nevertheless I think it would be possible to pursue a less anachronistic policy than Wikitree currently does. Most reference works on medieval people are able to provide reasonable approaches to such questions.

However, in practice Wikitree policy does not make anachronism avoidance a priority, and I've been told that we just have to accept surnames which the people involved would never have even recognized. So I think that makes this discussion irrelevant in most cases?

As I understand it, Wikitree has a policy which pushes us to assign a surname to a male line. Apparently searching on the internet needs to work like an old phone book! :)

Comments

cases where daughters were called "Fitz" (son) or where men who were the son of a Richard were called FitzHugh

Assuming of course that you have a verbatim quote from a primary source, preferably in the original language.  Anything secondary might be inventing stuff.

"William FitzWilliam" of Sprotborough fl 1280 had a father called Thomas, but that doesn't prove anything, because he's Willelmus filius Thomae in the sources - it's only genealogists who insist on calling him FitzWilliam anyway.

The worst made-up patronymics are the ones where the parentage is uncertain.  The Celtic fringe is the worst for this - ap names and mac names are made up quite freely by pedigree-mongers according to their own guess about the genealogy. 

Also the Vikings.  I've just proposed a merge of an Edwardsdatter and a Klacksdottir - same wife, two different theories about her father, neither of them well-sourced.  If either name was actually in the records, we'd know who her father was.

 

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I agree that if we really want to avoid anachronisms we have to look at primary evidence. I guess though that whatever we do, you end up with some cases where you need a policy as a tie breaker. Richardson for example has his pickiness about not using Latin names, or even French ones, for example preferring Fitz Peter instead of Fitz Piers (which I find pretty English also).

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I am not a genealogy expert, but I disagree with Richardson. My position is that we should be using whatever name a person was called by when living. I suppose it could be a "toss of the coin" in the early second millennium, but a real problem in latter part of the era. There has been a tendency to anglicize names (both given and family) of Europeans, particularly Germans, who immigrated into the U.S. during the 18th and 19th centuries. This has caused confusion, errors, and difficulty is tracing ancestries. In some cases the individuals, themselves, altered their name, but far more often it was done by people who had no understanding of naming practices of the time.

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Yes but for the 12th century it is perhaps more complicated that you realize. Most primary documents are in Latin, which the people did not speak. Scribes translated names into Latin forms, but possibly these forms were rarely actually used in speech. Secondly almost no primary documents from that period are in English, but many of the names being represented in French or Latin were English (or indeed another language like Welsh, Breton, Flemish, Gaelic, or indeed the old Frankish language which lies beneath many of the French names). Thirdly in every language, there was often massive variations in the spellings etc.

So in the end that is why I say it makes some sense to have a policy to break ties. It becomes ridiculous to try to truly argue which spelling represents what people actually said. I've seen many silly things such as saying William the conqueror and William the Marshall were "really" named Guillaume (which is MODERN French, and further from modern English than what was written at the time in French). I'd prefer Richardson's approach any day to that. I can handle the occasional odd one like his objection to Piers.

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OK, I accept your argument for the 12th century. However, I still think record searching would be easier and more productive if the name form most commonly used in contemporary records were to be used. Changing whatever may be written to a modern form of the same language is just as bad, and probably worse, than anglicizing the name. Of course, this argument falls apart if the contemporary records are written in anything other than the Roman alphabet.

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But I think the two aims you describe conflict with each other in many cases, and it is those cases we are talking about. Trying to make every male line have one second name, when in reality they do change often (even today) is not consistent with avoiding giving people names they never had. It is one or the other?

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My concern is with individuals, not lines. Names do change, no question about that. It still happens today for one reason or another. My point is being consistent with individual names found in contemporary records, not in whether the family line name is consistent for presentation in modern records. However, understanding of naming practices within a society is important to understanding the evolution of names, as well as why contemporary records sometimes contain differing names for a single individual.

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I've seen many silly things such as saying William the conqueror and William the Marshall were "really" named Guillaume (which is MODERN French, and further from modern English than what was written at the time in French).

When I saw the actual Bayeaux tapestry, I remember noting that it was spelt with  "W"

 

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There is of course the theory that it was made in England, in the Anglo Saxon tradition, so starting with a W is entirely possible.

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W is and was used in many old dialects of French.