For instance, almost all Irish names of French origin (and there are a lot of them, including pretty much everything beginning with "Fitz" which is a bastardization of the French "fils de") are basically 'slave names,' because the Normans imposed the feudal system on Ireland and turned the peasants into serfs, and the serfs often took on the name of their lords, in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe. ? The Irish originally didn't have surnames, just patronymics, and this was true of a lot of Northern Europe, and is still true today in Iceland, where nobody has family names because they keep to the tradition. Also, many of the names we think of as East European Jewish are just the names of the towns or provinces Jews happened to live in when the Prussian censustakers came by. ?They typically didn't carry surnames but the census forms required them, so they became Gunzberg, or Dresdener or Posener etc. ? My ggrandmother from Bequia's name, it turns out, is Polish Jewish and was the original name of a village in Lithuania. ?By the time the name came down to my grandmother, it had been distorted into an Italian-sounding name which took me 20 years to sort out. Anyhow, the farther back you look the more you realize nobody can trace their lineage very well, and names are pretty arbitrary.