ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 1894 http://www.s-gabriel.org/1894 ************************************ From: "Sara L Friedemann" 31 Dec 1999 Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You wanted to know if is an authentic name for a German woman living in England in 1545. You also asked if it would be appropriate for you to take an English surname because you were married to an Englishman. Here is the information we have found. We believe that is a typo for , found in 1385 and 1419; we did not find any German examples of without the final , and we would be surprised to see the German name without the ending vowel. [1] However, is a fine name; it was pronounced \mar-g@-RAY-t@\, where the \@\ represents the sound in or . It is most likely that a German woman living in England would have had her name written in the English form. While was the common form of the name in late 16th century England, we have found the spelling in England. [3] It is entirely possible that a lady named living in England could have been recorded in a written document as . would be pronounced the same as . The surname means "of Ruppa." However, we could not find any places called Ruppa in Germany. There is a lake near Potsdam called , but that is the closest we found. [2] If you let us know where you found , we can research this further and see if we can find anything more. However, in England in the 16th century, a woman usually adopted her husband's surname. If you would like to chose a surname for you and your husband, we recommend the book _A Dictionary of English Surnames_ by P.H. Reaney and R.M. Wilson. This is a fairly common book, and if it isn't available in your local library, you can probably procure it through inter-library loan. There is also an article available on-line that deals with late period English surnames: "English Names from Pre-1600 Brass Inscriptions" http://www.panix.com/~mittle/names/arval/brasses/ We hope that this letter has been useful to you, and that you will not hesitate to write again if any part was unclear or if you have further questions. Research and commentary on this letter was provided by Maridonna Benvenuti, Talan Gwynek, Arval Benicoeur, and Walraven van Nijmegen. For the Academy, ~Aryanhwy merch Catmael December 31, 1999 --------------------------------------- References: [1] Talan Gwynek, "Medieval German Given Names from Silesia" (WWW: SCA, Inc., 1998) [URL:http://www.sca.org/heraldry/laurel/names/bahlow_v.htm]. [2] Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names http://shiva.pub.getty.edu/tgn_browser/ [accessed 09Dec99] [3] Aryanhwy merch Catmael, "Late 16th Century English Names" (WWW: forthcoming)