Hacker News Reader

Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

I would guess at least 40 - I'm Scottish and I was raised in small village where part of my family had been for about 400 years. However, another part came from Orkney and the last mass immigration there was probably by the Vikings in the 8th or 9th centuries.

[Edit: Of course the reality can't be as simple as that - I have a slightly Asiatic appearance that is fairly common in the part of Scotland I am from - a Chinese doctor once thought I was Chinese (much to my amusement and his horror at potentially causing offence). I'm hoping for something interesting like a Orcadian Hudson's Bay man marrying an Innuit and returning home with his family... or something like that.]

View on HN

I've always been amused by family trees in the old world.

I was born in brazil but my great grandfather came as a war refugee fron Sweden (he had two brothers: one stayed in Sweden and the other fled to the Us). At that time there were refugees from all over europe arriving in latin america so it is very common where I live for someone to bear family names from 2 different countries (my wife has german and portuguese last names, for example).

Hence it is very difficult to trace our family trees past a few generations (although my family was very lucky to find relatives living in the Us and Sweden recently).

Our family name was "corrected" by some over-zealous Church of Scotland minister in the 19th Century - it was originally "Sclater" and was changed to the much more common "Slater". Just to confuse things, some of my ancestors really were originally Slaters as well!

That is something we have in common then. the original spelling of my family's name is "Lannerdahl" but it was "corrected" to "Landerdahl" (these "corrections" were also very common to immigrants' names.)

Btw, what do you mean by over-zealous (sorry, I'm not familiar with Scotish history).

"over-zealous"

The minister would have been some university educated outsider who presumably thought he knew better than the locals how to spell their names. After all if you see ten families called "Slater" and one called "Sclater" you might think that the last lost simply made a spelling mistake - and what the church said was law (effectively).

Wow first time I've ever met anyone that wasn't within the immediate family with that last name (Slater that is) I wonder if we were also affected by that...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com