At 09:31 AM 11/15/99 -0700, Drucilla Roberts wrote: >Does anyone have any idea where I can find surname origins and >meanings...I am looking for information on the surname "Vibbert"....I >appreciate any info..... Looking for surname meanings can be *very* tricky, as the information can be highly inaccurate --- and the exact origin of the surname might not be known. For example, mine does not mean "wheat field" or "white field". There are two places named Whitaker in the old (1800s) English geographies: one was "High Whitaker" and the other was "Nether [Low] Whitaker". Both were villages between Tamworth and Coventry: this area had been under the control of the Hwicca (pronounced "Whik-kuh" or thereabouts), which was a Saxon tribe. There may be a relationship to one of the Saxon personal names. Also, don't get tripped up by spelling. Our ancestors didn't all start spelling their last names the same way every time until early in the 1900s: the government and the corporations (such as the railroads) required them to choose one spelling of their last name and stick to it. So, you might have to get VERY creative when you're going through indexes looking for those ancestors. Spelling can have little to do with pronunciation. (For example, pronounce my last name "White-aker" and I may just stare at you. I pronounce it with a short "i", the a and the e as schwas (the "ih" sound).) Some of our ancestors either got their last names re-spelled for them when they landed and had to start telling officials their names or they decided to re-spell their last names, especially if the family had been illiterate for a generation or few, or if the ancestral language had been forgotten. (For example, the surname "Mullinix", which I've seen in western North Carolina, was originally Molyneux.) Also, political boundaries in continental Europe have changed frequently in the last four hundred years. One of those changes -- the conquest of a German-speaking country called the "Palatinate" by France in the late 1600s -- forced many of our ancestors across the English Channel to Britain or across the Atlantic to North America. Old French names in the South -- and, to me, "Vibbert" looks French -- most often came from Protestant emigrants from France ("Huguenots") in the 1600s who settled in the English colonies. (Louisiana and Alabama were never English colonies.) Elizabeth Whitaker [email protected]