Dear List, I found this on one of my other lists and found it very interesting in respect of name changes. Peggy Price Maybe someday someone could put together a tutorial about surname changes from one language to another, and everyone could add what we have learned on our own. Added to the confusion are direct translations not only between English and other languages, but between other languages besides English. I once saw the name CHURCH on a census page in Michigan with all recent German immigrants, some of whom had variations of the name ELGAS or ELGIS etc. Later I had been following this name back through Germany to Alsace and France on the LDS site, and figured out that Elgas had been L'Eglise in French, meaning CHURCH. I can see how a German would have had a hard time pronouncing and spelling that French word, resulting in over 200 variations of the name now. I suspect the name CHURCH in the German neighborhood in Michigan really might be part of the rest of the Elgas family. I also saw Hillegas, which sometimes resulted in the Hill surname. Another problem is that some of us have very unusual surnames, and it would be logical to think that the same name and spelling is probably somehow related. I thought all Simoniks were probably related, until I realized that the name was Simon in Germany or France, which changes an unusual name to very common. In Ancestry magazine there was a story about 4 families with a very unusual surname in a small village , whose descendents did DNA testing, and none of these families were related. A Simonik researcher in CZ found that Simoniks where his ancestors came from got their name from a Knight named Simon, who was given land in the 1300's and all his peasant subjects took the name Simonik, according to legend by the town registrar. He found only 60 Simonik's in the world in phone books , and tried to contact all of them. I even saw a note on the internet that someone's Turkish grandfather had IK added on the end of Simon, meaning dancing feet or something like that. (Don't quote me on that one) If my German Simons went to Romania or Slovakia or Poland etc, I might miss the correct branch, with the different suffixes. One common German name change I noticed is the suffix EN or IN to make a name feminine. If the permanent spelling of the name has such a suffix in whatever country the family lands, then that name may not be changed anymore, for men and women. I think a lot of our brick walls start coming down once we figure out name changes, and ANYTHING goes as far as the end result of a name change.