By James M. Beidler
Until recently, when someone said they believed that their ancestor surnamed say Marburger must have come from the German university city of Marburg, I would have smiled and told them that this was likely the case but not in a genealogically provable way. That’s because there are significantly fewer remaining records of common German people from the 1300 to 1500s when most peasant types were taking surnames, and someone would not have taken such a geographically specific surname while living in the namesake city but rather once they left, as the whole point of surnames is to differentiate people with the same given names. However, I’ve now found at least two situations in which researchers have traced their families to the “dawn of the surname” … proving that one should “never say never” in genealogy.
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