Surnames from Baptismal Names. 
5 
the old district of Suabia, the heart of which is the modern king¬ 
dom of Wiirtemberg, or better, the region around the head waters 
of the Neckar and Danube rivers. Baedeker’s map of the country- 
lying between the famous Tubingen oh the Neckar, and Ulm on 
the Danube, has the names of twenty-three of the more import¬ 
ant places printed in capitals; eleven of these end in -ingen. 
I judge that one-half of the names of towns and villages on this 
map have this ending. Taylor in Words and Places holds that 
a comparison of the English and Suabian place-names is a suffi¬ 
cient proof that England and Wiirtemberg were settled by the 
same Saxon stock. This fact is otherwise unrecorded. 
SURNAMES FROM BAPTISMAL NAMES. 
The custom of giving to a child the Christian name of the 
father with the word •son or -daughter added thereto, as a per¬ 
sonal, descriptive second-name, has been a favorite one in 
Scandinavian countries. This custom was recently observed 
in the Shetland Islands, where the inhabitants are of Nor¬ 
wegian blood; and it may still be in force there. The names 
John Magnus’-son and Magnus Johnson, for example, marked 
successive generations in Shetland. A sister of Magnus John¬ 
son would be known as “Mary, John’s-aaughter. ” Such a fluct¬ 
uation as this marked the first use of patronymic names in -son 
in England and Scotland. For example, Richard Johnson, son 
of John Richardson, is named in an English document of 1402. 
The possessive (’)s has the same meaning as - son , as in Will¬ 
iams. 
I cite a passage from a standard work concerning the use of 
such names at the present time in Norway and Sweden: 
“I alighted at a farm called Husum [in southwestern Nor¬ 
way], and was welcomed by old Roar Halvorsen and his family, 
which consisted of Roar Roarsen, his eldest son, Haagen, Iver, 
Halvor, and Pehr, and two daughters, Sonneva and Sigrid. The 
way of keeping family names is very peculiar among the bonder 
[farmers] of Norway and Sweden. For instance, the head of 
the family of Husum is Roar Halvorsen (Roar, the son of Sal¬ 
vor); the eldest son, as we have seen, is called Roar Roarsen; 
