Germaniškos kilmės kėdainiečių antroponimai XVII-XVIII a. Kėdainių miesto istorijos šaltiniuose

ENFrom the end of the 3rd decade of the 17th century arriving Germans already had surnames, but the records (registration) of their heritable anthroponym was likely to vary. This is extremely obvious when members of the same family (husband and wife), etc. are registered one after the other. It occurred that the woman’s name and her maiden name were omitted. Furthermore, some record files of a magistrate sometimes indicate only the common surname of the litigating spouses. A person (plaintiff, defendant, etc.) mentioned in one document could have been recorded in a shorter, simpler or just different form in the other record of trial. This is presumably related to changes in usage and the informal description of townspeople. Germanic anthroponyms of the 17th–18th centuries may be traced mainly in Kėdainiai magistrate records, written in the Latin and Polish languages. Therefore, the use of Latin and Polish forms of Christian names was the most common. Clerks found the sound of Germanic surnames quite unusual; thus, the historical sources report various graphical versions of Germanic surnames. This phenomenon was widespread and unstructured. More diversity was noticed in the records of personal names of German women living in Kėdainiai. Slavic suffixes -ova (-owa in historical sources), usually added to denote the surname of a married woman, and -ovna (-owna), added to denote the surnames of unmarried women, used to be affixed to their second anthroponyms in Kėdainiai magistrate books of the 17th–18th centuries. [From the publication]