Saturday, August 27, 2005

Last names

I was thinking about the portuguese last names the other day (it's amazing what you come up with when you have dozens of things to do...) and coincidentally there was a piece on the news today that talked about that and about people being interested in knowing their ancestors.
It's commonly known that people that have surnames refering to trees have jewish ancestors. So they'de be anyone called: Pereira, Oliveira, Carvalho, Silva, Figueira...
Then there's the names that derive from the first names of the parents, like in Iceland: Simões, Henriques, Gonçalves...
There are also names from the places people lived in: Almeida, Guimarães, Évora, Porto, etc...
And then there are names like mine...which a total mystery to me because it doesn't mean anything and it doesn't even resemble anything. :)