Listers, With permission of the writer, I am posting this short account of naming patterns in Portugal at present. The writer is D. Kleber, and it was posted at Madeira Exiles -L I found it informative. Tian In answer to the question: "Can someone explain a bit about Portuguese naming patterns?" D. Kleber replies: In Portugal/Madeira: 1. Multiple surnames are common. Two or three is normal. One surname is odd. I don't know anyone with just one surname up here in Northern Portugal. I have a 29 year old friend named Isabel Maria dos Santos Barbosa de Oliveira Lopes Pereira da Silva. (Pereira da Silva comes from her husband.) Her family is from Lisbon. 2. If I am not mistaken, prior to 1920 it wasn't even a legal requirement to have a surname. (circa 1920 "Regulamento relativo à identificação dos portadores de Bilhete de Identidade) That is, your legal name could just be MARIA... and nothing else. After 1920, once you either reached adulthood or requested an official document, you had to "choose" a family name. It could be any of the surnames that your family had carried and/or given you. Using the example above, you can see that if Isabel was one of your relatives AND the others had names like hers then you had many choices for your own, personal family name: It could be Barbosa, it could be Barbosa de Oliveira, perhaps just Lopes, etc, etc. 3. It was, and is, common for mothers to give their children their surnames as well as their father's surname. Thus the usual minimum of two surnames. Often they also throw in some other favorite surname from a grandparent. 4. Devotional names are popular, too. Maria das Dores (literally Mary of the Pains, one of my personal favorites), Ana de Conceição, Maria de Jesus, Maria dos Santos... These devotional names are used in addition to surnames. 5. The de/do/da isn't really part of the name, unless it is sandwiched between two other names. That is, "de Freitas" is officially just "Freitas" (But "Nunes de Viveiros" is officially "Nunes de Viveiros.") 6. Nowadays it seems that siblings up here in Northern Portugal *USUALLY* all have the same "main" (usually the father's?) surname, as well as a few other surnames which may vary between siblings. In the old days, siblings could, and did, have totally different surnames. That is, no common surname was required among all siblings. 7. UPON ENTERING AMERICA: (a) most Exiles chose to use just one of their surnames. Our "Nunes de Viveiros" became NUNES in America, even though, on Madeira, Nunes de Viveiros identified a very specific family group... very different from someone named just Nunes. (b) Sometimes the "de/da/do" was incorporated into the surname. DeFreitas = de Freitas. (c) And, of course, the spellings often changed considerably. This can all be very confusing but I hope that this helps somewhat. In a subsequent posting, the question was asked "Why would syblings of the same family have different surnames?" The reply from D. Kleber: I can only give you my opinion, because I don't "know" the reason... In the USA, going back at least two centuries, you can often use a single surname to track your family. It was inherited through the fathers and connoted (varying amounts of) familial importance. Example: My grandfather, after a nasty property dispute, renounced his family and changed his surname. This was considered the gravest insult and says a lot about the depth of dispute. Such was the power of a surname in the USA in the early 1900s. In Portugal, particularly prior to 1920, I get the impression that a surname was used to honor your relatives and/or bless a child. They were not used to "track" a family. You will definitely find siblings with different surnames and you might even find that sometimes your Chris Nunes de Sousa is legally recorded as Chris Nunes or perhaps even Chris Sousa. It makes things tougher for us budding genealogists but it's a lovely idea, once you get used to it. (I think I read somewhere--but I could DEFINITELY be wrong as I can't find/quote a source--that you had to have a family link to any surnamed used. That is, you could give your child a surname from a parent, grandparent, perhaps great-grandparent but not some random surname. Anyone know more about this?)