"You live as long as you are remembered." - Russian Proverb

 The Name Game - Part 3 of 3

I'm sure everyone is thinking by now, "are you kidding? This dude has more to say about names?" And believe it or not, yes! When I started this research I never had any idea that names could be this complicated. Who knew? 

In many languages or cultures (Slavic countries and also in Greece) there is a surname version for the boys vs. the girls...like Lutovský for boys and Lutovská for girls.

Also, in many languages we see many names which refer to a child being the son or daughter of a particular individual. Johnson is one of the most common surnames I'm sure everyone is familiar with. Johnson means son of John. Or in Ireland we see a lot of O'Connor, which means the same thing, "Son or Daughter of Connor."

In the Czech language, if the root of a surname is not the name of a town or village like Lutovsky, and is a noun or a man's first name, then a boy's surname would remain as is, and the girls' would get the suffix of "ova." Ova meaning "daughter of" or "wife of." A common Czech surname is Novák, so a boy's surname would remain as is...Novák, and a girl's would get the ová suffix...so, her last name would be Nováková.

Or, if the root of the word ends in a ý, then for the boys, the name remains as is, such as Černý, which is the Czech word for the color Black, and a surname. And the female version would be Černá.

I know this seems odd on the surface since we don't have an equivalent in English, although we used to have something similar. When I was a kid, especially for school paperwork, my Mother would never sign her name as Carol Lutovsky. Instead, she used to write Mrs. Wesley Lutovsky. She wasn't trying to fool anyone into thinking that her name was Wesley Lutovsky, so by adding the "Mrs." to the beginning, she was letting everyone know grammatically that she was the wife of Wesley Lutovsky, much like the suffix "ova" still does today.

The suffix of "ova" is currently being hotly debated in the Czech Republic. There is a movement underway to make it optional whether a woman wants to use the "ova" suffix or not. It's currently pretty much mandatory, with only a few exceptions for foreigners, or Czech natives who might go live abroad.

If you click on the graphic, a larger version will appear.

The reason I am pointing this out is so everyone can understand why there are different versions of surnames in our family tree. Above is a screen shot of the wife of John Lutovsky and her siblings. You can see her and her sisters' last names are Brožová, and her brothers' are Brož. I have noticed that once a woman immigrated to the US, they would drop the Czech version of their names, and just use the masculine version.

I haven't seen any US paperwork yet where a woman continued to use the feminine version of her surname. It may have been too confusing back in the 1800's to try and explain why your last name was different from the man you are claiming is your husband, or different from someone you are claiming to be a brother. I'm sure there was enough of a language barrier with most of the immigrants at that time with not being able to speak English well, if at all.

So, in this tree I have struggled with how should I be spelling everyone's name? The Czech way with accents over the vowels, or the English way with no punctuation marks? I decided to split it. If a person was born in Bohemia or Czechoslovakia or now the Czech Republic, then I am going to spell their name the correct way for their language. If a Lutovsky was born in the US and had the US spelling, then I kept it that way. That way by looking at the tree, and now knowing my secret code, if you see accents in a person's name, that means they were born in Bohemia/Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic. If there are no accents, they were born here in the US.