Taking the name of your employer

[greyingrey]

Was this usual ?

There was (maybe still is) a well established family of Ashers in the village of Ruddington Notts....traditionally headed by a William Asher (all first sons named William etc). The main road in the village is still called Asher Lane today...don't know how long they'd been there, but there's a will registered from the sixteenth century.

In the late eighteenth/mid nineteenth centuries a lot of German/Jewish immigrants with the name of Asher settled in Notts & Leics (mainly in the Notts/Leics border area where Ruddington is...obviously they eventually gravitated to the cities of Nottm & Leics for work) And there are an awful lot of William Ashers among them.

Has anyone come across this kind of thing before & if so what does it indicate ? That they were forced to adopt this name....that they started off as labourers for him etc etc ? Would it have been seen as an insult or a mark of respect.? Or were they just picking up on a local name maybe coincidentally having an English meaning (living by an ash tree or whatever) & also being the name of one of the tribes of Israel & therefore fitting in with the Jewish tradition ?

Answers on a postcard.........

[Little Nell]

It's entirely possible they were called Asher (or German-Jewish equivalent Ascher or similar) before they came to England. I wouldn't necessarily assume there's a connection - and William is a very common first name.

[greyingrey]

Yes....I think they probably did have a similar sounding surname....but the number of Williams is astounding (but, as you say, it could be a coincidence...just curious)

[Chr1s]

I seem to remember something on Fiona Bruce's WDYTYA about being allowed to take your boss's name. (It stuck in my mind because my boss is called Bruce). This may have been a Scottish custom. Anyone remember, or is that episode still on iPlayer ?

[Olde Crone Holden]

It was the custom to take a surname from a feudal lord but that was centuries ago and I think the practice died out well before the 18th and 19th century.

However, if you were a newcomer to the area and had no English surname then I supose you might take the first English surname you heard...I really doubt this though! It is either just coincidence or there was a family link way back.

OC

[naomiatt]

Hi - I think it's more than likely a coinicidence but it could be that some family were already there..Germanic Jews had fixed surnames from 1812 onwards..before then it was probably related to their occupation..Galician Jews had to take surnames from 1787 http://jewishness.bellevueholidayren...ish_names.html Sephardic Jews tended to use family names early on - from the 10th century onwards http://www.jewfaq.org/jnames.htm I think the Asher's were probably Sephardic..so they would have had that surname (or how it was spelt before they got to the UK) early on.

[Little Nell]

William became a very popular surname after William the Conqueror and its estimated that at least a third of men in England in the 11th century were named William. I myself have a father ,2 great x 2 grandfathers, and umpteen gt + more grandfathers named William as well as various uncles. It really is one of the commonest male surnames - and both I and my husband have unrelated William Williams ancestors in our tree!

[greyingrey]

Thanks everyone...it was really a kind of general question rather than a "serious research" type of thing, because I was wondering how the local well to do family would have felt about it (which we'll never know of course...but I wondered if it had been encouraged elsewhere) From what I've seen up to now, I think that they probably had a name which sounded something like Asher & it slid into that. They seem to have had strong links with (& maybe came from) the Jewish community in Portsea &, according to Ancestry, Hampshire has the largest number of "English Ashers"....I have been in contact with someone who can trace English Ashers back there to Tudor times, but they were nothing to do with my lot....& there are far more Ashers of German/Jewish immigrant stock up in the East Midlands now than there are of English rooted Ashers anywhere. So maybe the adoption of the name came in Portsea & it just so happened that they ended up near a well to do English Asher family in Notts (the person in Hampshire hasn't found any links between these 2 sets of English Ashers)

Sorry....just found it interesting as a general point....thanks for your thoughts

[Olde Crone Holden]

A common misspelling of Holden is Holding and I use the two names interchangeably when researching. However, there is a clear and separate bloodline called Holding (which is frequently mistranscribed as Holden, of course!) in the same small geographical area. As you say, just sheer coincidence. The surname is no indicator of a shared bloodline.

OC