Gerald, In almost all of its forms, Johnson and other "son" names can be traced back to some form of patronymic. The Scandinavians are the most prevalent simply because they abandoned the practice most recently, and had their largest wave of emigration to the US about the same time (as you stated, mid to late 1800's). As I recall, in England patronymics were formally outlawed by edict in the early 1600's, although the practice had already been mostly abandoned by that time. With very little assistance from Scandinavians, Johnson was already the fourth most common surname in the newly formed United States at the time of the American revolution. Further, the practice of patronymics (and occasionally matronymics) can be found in almost every culture. As a percentage of population, surnames which originated as patronymics comprise the single largest category of name origins, where the other common origins are, trade names (Smith, Shoemaker), place names (Waters, Rivers), and nick names (Brown, Kennedy). If you look at the top five most frequently occurring surnames in the US, Smith, Johnson, Williams, Jones and Brown respectively, only Smith and Brown are not patronymics, while Johnson and Jones are different forms of the same name (see below). In addition to "son" (generally English or Swedish), other common patronymic prefixes or suffixes include: Mc, Mac, O' - MacDonald, O'Leary - Scottish, Irish s, up - Williams, Upjohn - Welsh sen - Christiansen - Norwegian, Danish ez - Martinez, Rodriguez - Spanish sohn - Mendelssohn - German de - DeLorean - French di - DiMarco - Italian ovich - Ivanovich - Russian ibn - Ibn Nasser - Egyptian (?) al - Al Fayed - Arabic I suspect "ski" (Pulaski), "wicz" (Abramowicz) and a few other suffixes are patronymics as well, but I do not know for sure. Lastly, fortunately there are many spellings for names that all mean Johnson or "son of John". A partial list includes: Johnson Johnston Jones Jackson Johns Upjohn Ivanovich Juarez Johansson, Johanssen Janson, Jansson, Janssen, Jensen Jonsson, Jonssen And many more. If a common spelling were accepted, we would have to create one phone directory dedicated to Johnsons, and one for everyone else <g>. Regards, Eric > It has been said that Johnsons are from Sweden. But we are also from > Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales, all of Scandinavia, Germany (maybe > spelled Johansson or Jonsson or mangled from Jorganson), and Normandy. > Its been reported that there was a Johnson with the Norman invaders of > England in 1066. I think its true that Johnsons populate the whole earth > today. Many times I figure any family tree that doesn't show Johnsons is > just incomplete... > > It may be that some of the English Johnsons came down from Viking > invaders long before 1066, but in old English Johnstone meant the estate > and many servants took that as their name. The prefix Fitz in some eras > of old English meant "son of" also to confuse the issue. > > Worse confusion comes from Scandinavia where until about a century ago > the practice was to use SON as a suffix the father's given name (Dotter > for girls), so the last name of children of Sven Larson would be Svenson > and Svendotter. The last name didn't carry through the generations > unless the first name did too.