The Power of an Unusual Surname

Barbara Krasner-Khait discusses the benefits of unusual names in genealogy.

Dr. Emil Zuckerkandel.

“Unusual names have two advantages — there are limited numbers and everyone remembers it if they ever met one. The advantages and uses of the first are obvious. I was surprised to find how important the second is. People tend to remember some elementary school classmate or casual acquaintance with an unusual name,” says researcher Israel Pickholtz.

If you’ve got an unusual surname in your family, you can put those days of time-intensive, laborious, no-results research behind you. The resources available to you today make it easy to find even the most remote listing of your name; you can realize the benefits that only the unusual surname offers.

Finding the Unusual Surname
Using CD-ROM tools like Phonedisc PowerFinder Pro and 300 Million Ultimate Phone Directory, Internet sites like Switchboard (www.switchboard.com) and WhoWhere (www.whowhere.com), or just the plain old white pages, you can begin an inventory of your name. Says New York City genealogist Madeline Okladek, “With the unusual name of Prochownik, I found people through the White Pages. I’ve gotten through to most of them. In Paris, I also found a lost relative in the White Pages by just calling and asking.”

Try entering your unusual surname on search engines like Altavista or Lycos. The name’s rarity will not turn up an overwhelming number of hits and the ones that do turn up can lead you to helpful information and possibly, direct family connections.

Like search engines, mega-databases offered on web sites such as Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com), FamilySearch (www.familysearch.com) and Family Tree Maker Online (www.familytreemaker.com) can help you find important links to records and researchers that could substantially add to your research results.

And searches in records and indices, such as voter lists and city directories, are easy: you may seldom find the name, but when you do, you know you can use the information. As one researcher says, “Your name tends to stick out like a sore thumb when scrolling through microfilm. If you write for documents, you have a better chance of getting the right one than if you have a common name.”

Using the Power of an Unusual Name
Develop an e-mail or postal mail form letter that you can personalize and send to all the names and addresses you find in phone books and on the web. Keep questions simple but ask enough to be able to determine whether there could be a link between your families.

Using a genealogical software feature like “add unrelated individuals” you can store all your unusual surname information in one place to create a single-name database. This will make it easier to see what you’ve collected and either hypothesize possible relationships or establish them when your research provides the evidence to make the link.

Says Joel Ives of New Jersey, “My approach is to try to connect everyone who ever lived with the unusual surname. You obviously cannot do that with a common name. I’ve created a separate database of the Zankel name. I have only identified a few hundred people with this name while searching every database that the Internet has to offer as well as doing other genealogical research. Every time I find a Zankel I add them to my searchable database with all the notes about where I’ve obtained the information. When I do find a connection, I merge the individuals.”

When I receive a call or e-mail query about the name Zuckerkandel, I can quickly check my database of more than 1,000 Zuckerkandels from more than 30 towns in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, and see what information I may already have. I can then easily refer to it during the conversation and make modifications to the data if necessary.

Says San Diego family historian Bert Lazerow, “I collect every occurrence of my family names — Kimmelman and Palley — and their variants and place the details at the end of that tree in a list organized by given name headed ‘Kimmelmans I cannot yet place on the family tree.’ This process has permitted me to help other researchers working on the same name, in some cases piecing together two different strands of the same family from two different researchers who did not realize that they were related.”

Another possibility that arises is the ability to establish a surname research family. A family historian in Israel serves as the mentor of a family surname Research Group with about 80 members worldwide who research the name in all its variations. He says, “We have found that all of our trees originated in Lithuania and that many of the given names were found in the early ancestors and repeated in the families. We were able to find links among a number of these trees, and we continue to seek other links.”

Networking can also mean sharing research costs. And family reunions become practical, manageable events. Says Family Chronicle publisher Halvor Moorshead, “The various family genealogists have linked everyone with our surname in the world and we believe we know of every one alive today. The small number leads to a community feeling.”

Rare names can often spawn many genealogists. Moorshead, whose surname is held by only about 160 people worldwide, says, “In our ‘family’ we have 15 people involved in genealogy — roughly 10 percent.” That means more resources on the task and ultimately, more results and connections.

One disadvantage is that unusual names are frequently misspelled.

Dealing with Research Roadblocks
While we may find advantages to researching unusual names, our ancestors may not have. Often names seemed too long, too unpronounceable too ethnic, or were just not liked. The result? Accidental or intentional misspellings and name variations.

I looked in vain for my grandmother’s 1913 passenger record. Fortunately, I had her certificate of naturalization and was able to get copies of her papers from a local courthouse. The name had been misspelled as Zuckenkandel, thereby giving the name a different soundex code. A similar thing occurred when looking for her uncle’s 1897 passenger record: his name was listed as Zuckerkant.

Some of our ancestors looked to subtly change their unusual name or to drastically depart from it. Some Zuckerkandls spell the name as Zuckerkandel, some as Zuckerhandel, some changed the name to Randall or Zurel or Zucker. Says Okladek, “Having the unusual surname of Prochownik, I found that no one wanted to keep it, so most of them changed their names to Prohov, Prohow, Parker, Price and to top it all, the names Cohn and Cohen.”

Our challenge is to hypothesize change patterns and look there as welled exploring all soundex code possibilities as well.

Not A Curse but a Blessing
While researching a unique surname presents some risks, the benefits far outweigh them. Though more challenging to find, there’s a good chance that any occurrence of the name will relate to your family in some way. The name will stick in people’s memory and may guide you to other researchers and/or sources. There’s a higher probability of networking opportunities that can yield direct positive results. There will probably be some interesting oral histories to go along with the data you find.

That’s the true power of the unusual surname.

This article originally appeared in the November/December 1999 issue of Family Chronicle.