Surname conventions and laws vary around the world. This article gives an overview of surnames around the world.
Genealogy is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members. The results are often displayed in charts or written as narratives. The field of family history is broader than genealogy, and covers not just lineage but also family and community history and biography.
Chinese surnames are used by Han Chinese and Sinicized ethnic groups in Greater China, Korea, Vietnam and among overseas Chinese communities around the world such as Singapore and Malaysia. Written Chinese names begin with surnames, unlike the Western tradition in which surnames are written last. Around 2,000 Han Chinese surnames are currently in use, but the great proportion of Han Chinese people use only a relatively small number of these surnames; 19 surnames are used by around half of the Han Chinese people, while 100 surnames are used by around 87% of the population. A report in 2019 gives the most common Chinese surnames as Wang and Li, each shared by over 100 million people in China. The remaining eight of the top ten most common Chinese surnames are Zhang, Liu, Chen, Yang, Huang, Zhao, Wu and Zhou.
Creole peoples may refer to various ethnic groups around the world. The term's meaning exhibits regional variations, often sparking debate.
Korean names are names that place their origin in, or are used in, Korea. A Korean name in the modern era typically consists of a surname followed by a given name, with no middle names. A number of Korean terms for names exist. For full names, seongmyeong, seongham, or ireum (이름) are commonly used. When a Korean name is written in Hangul, there is no space between the surname and the given name.
Chinese names are personal names used by individuals from Greater China and other parts of the Sinophone world. Sometimes the same set of Chinese characters could be chosen as a Chinese name, a Hong Kong name, a Japanese name, a Korean name, a Malaysian Chinese name, or a Vietnamese name, but they would be spelled differently due to their varying historical pronunciation of Chinese characters.
A family tree, also called a genealogy or a pedigree chart, is a chart representing family relationships in a conventional tree structure. More detailed family trees, used in medicine and social work, are known as genograms.
A personal name, full name or prosoponym is the set of names by which an individual person or animal is known. When taken together as a word-group, they all relate to that one individual. In many cultures, the term is synonymous with the birth name or legal name of the individual. In linguistic classification, personal names are studied within a specific onomastic discipline, called anthroponymy. As of 2023, aside from humans, dolphins and elephants have been known to use personal names.
Nguyễn is the most common surname of the Vietnamese people.
A family reunion is an occasion when many members of an extended family congregate. Sometimes reunions are held regularly, for example on the same date of every year.
Yang is the transcription of a Chinese family name. It is the sixth most common surname in Mainland China. It is the 16th surname on the Hundred Family Surnames text.
Filipinos have various naming customs. They most commonly blend the older Spanish system and Anglo-American conventions, where there is a distinction between the "Christian name" and the "surname". The construct containing several middle names is common to all systems, but the multiple "first" names and only one middle and last name are a result of the blending of American and Spanish naming customs.
Mongolian names have undergone a number of changes in the history of Mongolia, both with regard to their meaning and their source languages. In Inner Mongolia, naming customs are now similar to Mongolia but with some differences.
Ding is a Chinese family name. It consists of only 2 strokes. The only two characters that have fewer strokes are "一" and "乙".
Chinese ancestor veneration, also called Chinese ancestor worship, is an aspect of the Chinese traditional religion which revolves around the ritual celebration of the deified ancestors and tutelary deities of people with the same surname organised into lineage societies in ancestral shrines. Ancestors, their ghosts, or spirits, and gods are considered part of "this world". They are neither supernatural nor transcendent in the sense of being beyond nature. The ancestors are humans who have become godly beings, beings who keep their individual identities. For this reason, Chinese religion is founded on veneration of ancestors. Ancestors are believed to be a means of connection to the supreme power of Tian as they are considered embodiments or reproducers of the creative order of Heaven. It is a major aspect of Han Chinese religion, but the custom has also spread to ethnic minority groups.
The Belnap Family Organization is a non-profit ancestral family organization that conducts primary genealogical research and preserves genealogical and other historical information on the Belnap/Belknap family surname, including the descendants of Mormon Pioneer Gilbert Belnap (1821–1899) and his plural wives Adaline Knight (1831–1919) and Henrietta McBride (1821–1899). According to its mission statement, the organization exists "to preserve, perpetuate, and promote family solidarity." It is one of the oldest and largest ancestral family organizations in existence, having been established in Utah in 1904.
The Pratt family is made up of the descendants of the Mormon pioneer brothers, Parley Parker Pratt and his brother Orson Pratt, whose father was Jared Pratt (1769–1839). It has many members in Utah and other parts of the U.S. There are many branches of the Pratt family, such as the Romney family and the Huntsman family.
Li or Lee is a common Chinese surname, it is the 4th name listed in the famous Hundred Family Surnames. Li is one of the most common surnames in Asia, shared by 92.76 million people in China, and more than 100 million in Asia. It is the second-most common surname in China as of 2018, the second-most common surname in Hong Kong, the most common surname in Macau and the 5th most common surname in Taiwan, where it is usually romanized as "Lee". The surname is pronounced as in Cantonese, Lí (poj) in Taiwanese Hokkien, but is often spelled as "Lee" in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Thailand and many overseas Chinese communities. In Macau, it is also spelled as "Lei". In Indonesia it is commonly spelled as "Lie". The common Korean surname, "Lee", and the Vietnamese surname, "Lý", are both derived from Lee and written with the same Chinese character (李). The character also means "plum" or "plum tree".
Sephardic Bnei Anusim is a modern term which is used to define the contemporary Christian descendants of an estimated quarter of a million 15th-century Sephardic Jews who were coerced or forced to convert to Catholicism during the 14th and 15th centuries in Spain and Portugal. The vast majority of conversos remained in Spain and Portugal, and their descendants, who number in the millions, live in both of these countries. The small minority of conversos who emigrated normally chose to emigrate to destinations where Sephardic communities already existed, particularly to the Ottoman Empire and North Africa, but some of them emigrated to more tolerant cities in Europe, where many of them immediately reverted to Judaism. In theory, very few of them would have traveled to Latin America with colonial expeditions, because only those Spaniards who could certify that they had no recent Muslim or Jewish ancestry were supposed to be allowed to travel to the New World. Recent genetic studies suggest that the arrival of the Sephardic ancestors of Latin American populations coincided with the initial colonization of Latin America, which suggests that significant numbers of recent converts were able to travel to the new world and contribute to the gene pool of modern Latin American populations despite an official prohibition on them doing so. In addition, later arriving Spanish immigrants would have themselves contributed additional converso ancestry in some parts of Latin America.
