Are people that share the same surname all related

[Sevendaysaweek]

Like for example two different families called smith are they related even it’s way back?

I had a rare placename maiden name - and yes I'm pretty sure everyone with it was related. Tiny outcrops across the UK, but from the south of England originally. I was the only person in the country with my not unusual first name last name combination.

Now I'm married into an occupational surname, I know two people with the same name as DH and five with the same name as BIL 😂.

I found a study once that claimed that at one point a huge proportion of the people with my surname came from a specific town (A), where my great great grandfather was born.

My surname itself is actually the name of a different town (B), but way back someone moved from town B to town A to marry the local heiress and become lord of the manor, became known by the name of his previous town, and all the rest of us are his descendants. Apparently.

I worked on an employment tribunal once where the claimant was representing himself.

He'd got hold of the company email address book and claimed it was evidence of nepotism. He'd gone through and counted all the smith, jones, brown, Patel etc and claimed they were all related... it was a company of around 30,000 people 🙄

Mmmm maybe if we go back to Mitochondrial Eve. In my case I have a bloke in my tree that comes to England around 1800 with a very dintistictive surname. Everyone in this country that has this surname is descended from him and all related to me!

No my name changed at the start of the 20th century, dunno if they were trying to be posh but they changed it from ending in AR to OW.

My Paternal grandfather was given his surname when he left a children’s home, it was chosen randomly. No way of knowing who he really was but not related to others with that surname,

My surname probably means my ancestors lived in a town. Not much unique there!

I have a moderately common surname, but in our case it was plucked from the phone book in the 1940s to make the family less vulnerable to antisemitism.

There's a rare surname Greatorex through my county and they probably are distantly related as they descended from a Norman nobleman, so it's a more distinct family line and not multiple sources into England. I looked into it after encountering a few clusters of it in different schools, but only in a relatively small area.

Surnames can corrupt with time, particularly around the 19th century when records were kept but many people were still illiterate. A friend had an unusual spelling when it was inadvertently altered by an immigration official.

People may end up with a surname without a genetic connection to it.

Occupational or place surnames are very common and often have multiple sources.

I have a very rare surname so I know if I meet another with that surname we’re related somehow.

Adam and Eve did make me chuckle 😁

With my surname, probably. We can only find a few of us in the world. My generation has no males in it and none of the females have chosen to pass the name on so once we're gone, so is the name. (Which is no loss for humanity as it's stupid).

Everyone is related to everyone else if you go back enough as the human gene pool got quite narrow

On my paternal grandmother's side everyone in the UK with her surname is related. It's a very unusual, distinctive name, her family came here to avoid religious persecution.

My surname is as common as Smith, Jones etc, so it's unlikely.

www.nature.com/news/genetic-adam-and-eve-did-not-live-too-far-apart-in-time-1.13478

@PostItJoyWeek

My surname describes the place my family lived at some point.

Like Marlow, Mountbatten, Scott, Welch, Newton De Niro, Holland.

I thought one of the surnames in my family related to a place of the same name in the Midlands, but I did a bit of research and found a relative who had throughly investigated 'us' and there is no connection at all to the place. However, the name is a corruption of a feature of the small village in Scotland where the family that we know of originate from. There are potential links to the same area (in Scotland)going back to the mid 1300s but not confirmed.

We have an instance of an uncommon name in the tree. It seems to occur in 2 counties in different parts of England but there doesn't seem to be any link. We live in one of the counties but not the one 'our' name comes from.
I think 'our' name is a corruption of another name which appears in a totally different branch of the tree but from the same area.
Where the other county's name comes from is a mystery.

Dh and I share the same family name but we’re not related although our grandparents were neighbours in India.

My mums maiden name is unusual and usually anyone with that name is connected somewhere and I am related to someone famous if that’s the case.

My maiden is common as muck almost as common as Smith and we can’t all be related.

The most recent common ancestor for all humans lived as recently as 3500 years ago.

If you're interested in this, there's an interesting current thread 'Ask me anything - I'm a genealogist'