ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 1514 http://www.s-gabriel.org/1514 ************************************ 1 Feb 1999 From: (Josh Mittleman) Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You asked for information about the surname or , which you believe to be Hungarian or Czech in origin. This letter is a brief answer to your question. We can't identify the origin of the surname with certainty. At the very least, it appears to have undergone some changes in spelling as it passed from one language into another. However, we do have a good guess: We found a Hungarian surname , which is derived from a town called which used to be Hungarian but is now located in either the eastern Czech part of the modern Czech Republic or western Slovakia. The surname is pronounced \BAW-rawn-chee\ [1]. This is the most likely source of your name that we were able to find. We also turned up a couple other more distant possibilities. There is a Hungarian village whose name was also used as a surname [2]; and there is a word "ram" in Russian and Polish which is the root of given names and surnames in both those languages [3, 4]. We hope this brief letter has been useful. Please write us again if you have any questions. I was assisted in researching and writing this letter by Brian M. Scott, Heather Rose Jones, Leslie Schweitzer, Brian R. Speer, and Brenda Klein. For the Academy, Josh Mittleman 1 Feb 1999 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - References [1] Ka/zme/r Miklo/s. "Re/gi Magyar Csala/dnevek Szo/ta/ra: XIV-XVII Sza/zad" Magyar Nyelvtudoma/nyi Ta/rsasa/g, Budapest, 1993. [2] Ka/lma/n, Bela, _The World of Names: A Study in Hungarian Onomatology_ (Budapest: Akedemiai Kiado, 1978), p.68. [3] Paul Wickenden of Thanet, "A Dictionary of Period Russian Names" (WWW: SCA, Inc., 1996). http://www.sca.org/heraldry/paul/ [4] Taszycki, Witold (ed.), _S{l/}ownik Staropolskich Nazw Osobowych_, vols. I-VII (Wroc{l/}aw: Zak{l/}ad Narodowy Imienia Ossoli{n'}skich, Polska Akademia Nauk, 1965-1987).