On portuguese surnames

Being a brazilian myself, I always got the impression that the portuguese had a lot less variaty of surnames than other europeans.

Some people may think this is too generalizing, but the most common surname in Portugal and Brazil (Silva) is held by 9 or 10% of the population, compared to Smith (1,26% in England), De Jong (0,5% in the Netherlands) or Smirnov (1,61% in Russia). If you take the top 10 surnames of Portugal you have about 49% of the population, while in most contries it hardly goes higher than 5%. Even in Spain the top 10 surnames make just 20% of the population.

So clearly Portugal has very few surnames compared to it's european neighbours, and it doesn't seems to be very related with population size or homogeneity. Why is that?
 
Being a brazilian myself, I always got the impression that the portuguese had a lot less variaty of surnames than other europeans.

Some people may think this is too generalizing, but the most common surname in Portugal and Brazil (Silva) is held by 9 or 10% of the population, compared to Smith (1,26% in England), De Jong (0,5% in the Netherlands) or Smirnov (1,61% in Russia). If you take the top 10 surnames of Portugal you have about 49% of the population, while in most contries it hardly goes higher than 5%. Even in Spain the top 10 surnames make just 20% of the population.

So clearly Portugal has very few surnames compared to it's european neighbours, and it doesn't seems to be very related with population size or homogeneity. Why is that?

Was Portugal's adoption of surnames different to that of its neighbours?

Well, one popular theory is that Brazil is the cause of the popularity of the "Silva" surname. "Silva" comes from "silvestre" or "from the jungle","from the forest". The theory says that many indigenous people of Brazil during the colonization era adopted the "Silva" surname after converting to catholicism, because they literally were "from the jungle". By the time the brazilian population began to mix, the name "Silva" spreaded.

But this is only a theory.
 
If Silva's as common in Portugal proper, the explanation doesn't work. Does it have to do with the fact that only a small part of Portuguese emigrated?
 

Lusitania

Donor
Well that not true. More Portuguese emigrated to Brazil till end of 18th century than people from British isles to the 13 colonies.
 
Being a brazilian myself, I always got the impression that the portuguese had a lot less variaty of surnames than other europeans.

Some people may think this is too generalizing, but the most common surname in Portugal and Brazil (Silva) is held by 9 or 10% of the population, compared to Smith (1,26% in England), De Jong (0,5% in the Netherlands) or Smirnov (1,61% in Russia). If you take the top 10 surnames of Portugal you have about 49% of the population, while in most contries it hardly goes higher than 5%. Even in Spain the top 10 surnames make just 20% of the population.

So clearly Portugal has very few surnames compared to it's european neighbours, and it doesn't seems to be very related with population size or homogeneity. Why is that?

Surnames die out over time but, after the initial round of creation, are rarely invented new. That means that the number of surnames declines over time. Societies that have used surnames for longer tend to have fewer of them, e.g. the Vietnamese.

I don't know how long surnames have been used in Portugal compared to other countries, but that would be my guess.
 
If Silva's as common in Portugal proper, the explanation doesn't work. Does it have to do with the fact that only a small part of Portuguese emigrated?

Not really, as Silva is already 9% of the portuguese mainland and the list of common surnames is pretty equal to Brazil's, with slight differences.

Was Portugal's adoption of surnames different to that of its neighbours?

Not as far as I know. Portuguese surnames seems to get standardized by the XVIII and XIX century like the rest of Europe, with most names being patronymic, profission or related to the place where they live. It doesn't seem to have been a more recent thing like with the dutch nor a particularly anciant custom, which could explain why comparably so few are left.
 
The number of Portuguese surnames can be quite vast, even if unequally distributed:
http://nosportugueses.pt/pt/apelidos/a

Like mentioned before, they can came from many different origins:
professions, locations, patronymics, nicknames, religious, etc
I posit there may be two parallel reasons for the large numbers of people with the surname Silva (forest, woodland).
  • New-Christians, often, but not always, chose plant names;
  • the vast majority of the population used to live in the countryside, and some of them might have chosen a surname related to their daily lives
 
This is speculation, but perhaps emigrating colonial soldiers and constant naval expeditions (and correspondingly deaths in those voyages) left a smaller than average number of male ancestors in Portugal itself. Portugal would have sent a high per capita number of men overseas to the empire.
 
The number of Portuguese surnames can be quite vast, even if unequally distributed:
http://nosportugueses.pt/pt/apelidos/a

Like mentioned before, they can came from many different origins:
professions, locations, patronymics, nicknames, religious, etc
I posit there may be two parallel reasons for the large numbers of people with the surname Silva (forest, woodland).
  • New-Christians, often, but not always, chose plant names;
  • the vast majority of the population used to live in the countryside, and some of them might have chosen a surname related to their daily lives
Some of those surnames aren't very Portuguese sadly...
 
The situation is even more extreme in Korea, where the 3 most frequent names Kim (22%), Lee (16%) and Park (10%) are held by almost half the ethnically Korean population and in ViệtNam, where the 3 most frequent names Nguyễn (38%), Trần (11%) and Lê (10%) account for close to 60% of the polulation.
 
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Lusitania

Donor
I believe that in China the similarity in names has resulted in the government requiring all babies to have two names now.
 
I used the parish archives in Portugal to trace my entire family tree on all sides to the early 17th century and there are some 4,000 individuals on it thus far. My family comes from a small town in central Portugal, and after speaking with genealogists I discovered the following about surnames. My family overwhelmingly comes from a cluster of villages and only in the 18th century did I find a few people coming from further afield in my family tree (including two individuals from Galicia and one from Dax in France). Individuals seem to intermarried within their villages, and while marrying first cousins seemed to have been rare, marriages between second and third cousins were exceedingly common. Additionally, Old Christians seemed to marry only other Old Christians as a stigma against Old Christians. My ancestors come from a few Old Christian villages, and though there was a neighbouring New Christian village, and there were hardly any intermarriages between the two, I could only count one marriage in the 19th century. The villages my ancestors came from tended to choose mates from further afield, and avoid choosing mates from New Christian areas. I found the status from looking at Inquisition Records, as there were a few women tried of witchcraft in my parents' village, and were called Old Christians, at the time there were only around 250 individuals there and most were interrelated in some form. By the 20th century, most inhabitants were descended from these few hundred individuals. According to older people from the village there was a mistrust against this other village and no one was sure why, they were said to have "bad blood". This persisted until the 20th century. Even then there seems to have existed a continuing distrust of outisiders.

In this region, the most common surnames in the villages during the 17th century were Antunes, Bernarda, Fernandes, Francisco, Lopes, Martins, Mendes, Nunes, Ramos, Reis, Rodrigues, Silva, Simão. Some such as Bernarda, Francisco, and Simão were passed onto children from the parents' given names. For instance, a woman named Bernarda born in 1588 had a few children and they took on the name da Bernarda.

Until the early 20th century Portuguese surnames were often chosen arbitrarily. The eldest son almost always took his father's surname, but other children particularly daughters would often take their mother's surname. Surnames such as Ferreiro came from a iron worker, surnames that were proper names often came from an individual's descendants whom were known as sons of or daughters of an individual. Additionally, outsiders to a village would often take the surname of their hometown as that is how they were known. Some would take on the name of a part of the village they lived, this is the case of my surname as my 3rd Great-Grandfather whom begins to show up with a different surname at his time of marriage (1861) than when he was baptised (1828). The reason seems to be that he shared the same name as two cousins, and as a result, he either took or was given the name of his section of the village as a surname. Others were given the surnames of other relatives, primarily if they were prominent people, for instance I have an army captain (Capitão-mor) in my ancestry in the 18th century whom gave his name as godfather to a few others of whom he had been chosen as Godfather. During the Estado Novo the system of children taking their father's surname as their principal name became the norm.
 

Lusitania

Donor
I used the parish archives in Portugal to trace my entire family tree on all sides to the early 17th century and there are some 4,000 individuals on it thus far. My family comes from a small town in central Portugal, and after speaking with genealogists I discovered the following about surnames. My family overwhelmingly comes from a cluster of villages and only in the 18th century did I find a few people coming from further afield in my family tree (including two individuals from Galicia and one from Dax in France). Individuals seem to intermarried within their villages, and while marrying first cousins seemed to have been rare, marriages between second and third cousins were exceedingly common. Additionally, Old Christians seemed to marry only other Old Christians as a stigma against Old Christians. My ancestors come from a few Old Christian villages, and though there was a neighbouring New Christian village, and there were hardly any intermarriages between the two, I could only count one marriage in the 19th century. The villages my ancestors came from tended to choose mates from further afield, and avoid choosing mates from New Christian areas. I found the status from looking at Inquisition Records, as there were a few women tried of witchcraft in my parents' village, and were called Old Christians, at the time there were only around 250 individuals there and most were interrelated in some form. By the 20th century, most inhabitants were descended from these few hundred individuals. According to older people from the village there was a mistrust against this other village and no one was sure why, they were said to have "bad blood". This persisted until the 20th century. Even then there seems to have existed a continuing distrust of outisiders.

In this region, the most common surnames in the villages during the 17th century were Antunes, Bernarda, Fernandes, Francisco, Lopes, Martins, Mendes, Nunes, Ramos, Reis, Rodrigues, Silva, Simão. Some such as Bernarda, Francisco, and Simão were passed onto children from the parents' given names. For instance, a woman named Bernarda born in 1588 had a few children and they took on the name da Bernarda.

Until the early 20th century Portuguese surnames were often chosen arbitrarily. The eldest son almost always took his father's surname, but other children particularly daughters would often take their mother's surname. Surnames such as Ferreiro came from a iron worker, surnames that were proper names often came from an individual's descendants whom were known as sons of or daughters of an individual. Additionally, outsiders to a village would often take the surname of their hometown as that is how they were known. Some would take on the name of a part of the village they lived, this is the case of my surname as my 3rd Great-Grandfather whom begins to show up with a different surname at his time of marriage (1861) than when he was baptised (1828). The reason seems to be that he shared the same name as two cousins, and as a result, he either took or was given the name of his section of the village as a surname. Others were given the surnames of other relatives, primarily if they were prominent people, for instance I have an army captain (Capitão-mor) in my ancestry in the 18th century whom gave his name as godfather to a few others of whom he had been chosen as Godfather. During the Estado Novo the system of children taking their father's surname as their principal name became the norm.

In the 1970s and 1980s in Canada I came across a few families from Terceira that only the boys took the father's surname and the girls took the mother maiden name since they were expected to marry and take the husband's surname there was no value in them having the father's surname.
 
Some of those surnames aren't very Portuguese sadly...
Some of the names were not Portuguese in origin, but were integrated into the Portuguese population.

Regarding Viriato and Lusitania's descriptions, there were indeed many "continuity breaks" in surnames, due to people adopting Godparents' surnames, choosing to drop surnames, giving different surnames to different children, and sometimes all of these, due to clerical error.
 
In the 1970s and 1980s in Canada I came across a few families from Terceira that only the boys took the father's surname and the girls took the mother maiden name since they were expected to marry and take the husband's surname there was no value in them having the father's surname.
That also occurred in the mainland, at least in the interior centre, during the early XX century.
 

Lusitania

Donor
Also fact that portuguese laws at those times stipulated all children needed to be registered within 1-3 months of birth. There were many stories of parents walking in with kids who had already started walking to register them and picking a date of birth 2 months before.

Speaking of clerical errors. My mother was born on sep 11 but all official documents stated she was born on September 14.
 
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