May I please offer an alternative origin and meaning to our Sasser family name to the "maker of sauces" origin. This IS the origin of a family name: Saucier and variant spellings. However, this is predominantly a French name and not English. The has been and still is a major difference in French and English foods: the French became famous for their gourmet cooking, while the working people of England are "meat and potatoes" folk. In the rural counties where you find our family name in England, there simply was no demand for an occupation such as a "sauce maker" because there weren't enough folks who could afford such luxuries. This was primarily reserved for the aristocracy in the larger cities and London. It certainly was not considered a "necessity" by the vast majority of English--their culinary fare was much more affordable. What they ate, they grew themselves. There are Saucier and Saucer families who settled in several Southern states. However, most (but not all) of these have a French origin. Most of those in Louisiana and Mississippi for instance, do have a French origin, having settled in Louisiana while it was part of the French Empire. One of the biggest problems in tracking down the origins and meanings of family names of folks who were not members of the aristocracy is the fact that the authors who wrote most of the British books on the subject simply didn't bother to take the time to do any real research on the "commoners" (there just wasn't any money in it!). I have found in some cases, that some of these so-called "authorities" apparently guessed at or even made up meanings and origins for some of the family names that I have researched. If any of our ancestors had become wealthy and been knighted, they one of these British "authorities" on surnames would have traced our origins a little better. A case in point is the family name Turnage: one of these authorities stated it meant a "turner of lathes" and another highly respected publication "Origins of English Surnames" stated it came from the parish of Turnditch in Derbyshire. I did a great deal of research and could not find a single person in history with a name even closely resembling this name in Derby county. On the contrary, I lucked up and found the family in villages all over the county of Essex, living in several communities named Woodham. They were there from the very beginning of family names in the region, starting in the late 1400's. I began to find such discrepancies on other family names. As for "a turner of lathes", this too, turned out to be grossly wrong. I had always broken the name down into the obvious root words "turn" and "age". After checking the "Oxford English Dictionary" (a large set of huge volumes and the most authoritative source on the meanings of English words), it became apparent that no word could be formed from two such root words. But then I discovered that the suffix "age" is a corruption of both "wich" (village) and "ness", a high place or peninsula. It turned out that "Turnish"/Turnage was a high holy place where the ancient god Thunor/Thor, the old Saxon god, was worshipped. Woodham turned out to be a place were Woden/Oden was worshipped. As a result, I decided to do some research on my own for the families that I am descended from. In each case, I was able to trace their origins to place names with a connection to the "Old Religion" of the ancient Saxons (and a few to the much smaller tribe of Angles, from whom the nation eventually took its name) who invaded and conquered Briton in the mid-400's AD. In almost EVERY occasion that you find a similar name to Sasser in any publication on family names, it will almost invariably say it is French and means a "cook" or maker of sauces. It is ironic that we can also find our family name SASSER in the very same county and adjoining counties, as above two family names. It is also extremely coincidental that we find these same three relatively rare family names in old Dobbs County, NC in the mid-1700's. Samuel L. Brown's book "Surnames Are the Fossils of Speech" gave two possible origins, one the standard "cook" (French) but really went off on a tangent with another "French" meaning of a dweller at the willow trees. The common folk of Essex and "The Southeast" of England are Saxons; those of adjoining Suffolk and Norfolk are Angles. These are the two large tribes of Germanic folk who became the modern English. It is my humble opinion that our family name SASSER (by whatever spelling we find it in old records on southeastern England) has a Germanic (Saxon/Angle) origin--not the French "cook" origin. These were yeomen (farmers who owned their own land), husbandmen (raised cattled & other domestic animals) or were laborers on large manors (farms). "Sasse" is pure Germanic and refers to the folk of Saxony in what is now Germany. They were once a powerful tribe in northwestern Germany on the coastal area. For some reason, many of these folk left there and invaded Briton and most of the remaining Sasse (Saxons) moved eastward. A dictionary meaning of "sassenach" is: "a typical Englishman; something considered typical of England." It is from Old English "Seaxan" (Saxon) of Germanic origin. If you break the name down into its root words, you have: "s" (the), sea, see, zee, zea; as; ar, er, or, ur (in all the Indo-Aryan or Indo-European languages, the vowels are completely interchangeable so don't worry about differences in spellings). In Old English, "the" was "se", "seo" or another word which used letters that are no longer used and can't be typed. The first of these could have two major possibilities: simply "the" or a reference to the sea. Since at the time of their invasion of Briton, they were considered a coastal or sea folk, this would certainly have strong weight for their tribal name (some historians and geologists believe they left this region due to the rising North Sea that flooded huge areas of old coast lines). Yet, the Saxon folk were not always a coastal folk. The second portion, or root word, is a common one throughout the Indo-Aryan speaking world from Briton and Scandanavia, Spain, to Greece, Russia, Iran and India. The root word "as, es, is, os, us" is a basic root word meaning god (goddess) or lord. The French word for god "deus" simply broken down into root words is "de (the) god". The name of the Greek's primary god, Zeus is exactly the same. Cultures throughout the Indo-Aryan area and the Near East and Middle East have had gods with these root words as either prefixes or suffixes (or in the middle) of compound words. Ishtar, a famous goddess became so well known to the Greeks that one of her symbols, a star, became known as just that "star". The Roman Jovis (Jove) and even the Hebrew Jhvh (Jehovah=Yaweh) can also be traced to this same root-word origin. The last portion of the "Sasser" name would be: ar, er, ir, or, ur; and the reverse of the vowels as: ra, re, ri, ro, ru. This is also a common root word throughout the Indo-Aryan region and translates variably as "shining", "bright", "golden", "ray" (sun's ray). In English, we use this root word for the light coming from the Sun--ray and the ancients worshipped the sun as a god in every land (or at least the symbol of a god). Without a lot of additional research, I would surmise that the makeup of the word means: "the shining god". In the case of our ancestors, this would not necessarily refer to the sun itself. For them, the sun was merely a symbol of their gods. The Germanic folk (including the present Germans, English, Danes, Swedes, Dutch, Belgians, Franks (French), Norwegians, etc.) had three primary gods: Woden (Scandanavian: Odin); Thunor (Sc.: Thor); and Frey. We still speak their names today: "Woden's daeg"=Wednesday; "Thunor's daeg"=Thursday; and Frey's daeg"=Friday. Although I have been extremely limited in the amount of books available on Old English, the Saxon language and English place-names, what little I have been able to find show a surprisingly huge number of sites throughout England with origins in the "Old Religion" or "Asatru" of the Saxons and Angles and in the later arrivals of the Danes (Vikings) in the region called the "Danelaw". With the coming of Christianity, many holy sites were given what English historians call "hidden" names to disguise their true meaning. It is interesting to note that in the region where our family name appears most frequently (Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk), that the letter r is rarely pronounced. "The letter "R" is not pronounced by the people of the English South and East; The West Country does pronounce the "R", according to "The Story of English" (1986). This would mean the R in SASSER would not be pronounced by the folk in that region as strongly as we Americans say it. This turns out to be true of the family name Turnage. I have often heard relatives pronounce this as "Tunnage" and found this spelling often in England up to the end of the 1700's. If I felt better tonight, I could probably come up with more ideas on this but I had a tooth pulled and I am in great PAIN. Got to go to work...(does anybody want to hear more later?) Your cuz, Robert Earl Woodham ------------------------------