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I'm fully African, as far as I know, but have an Austrian surname?
My ancestral country was supposedly colonized by Germany in the late 1800s. I always wondered about my surname. Neither my parents, grandparents, nor other people more versed in my ancestral language could determine its meaning. It's pretty rare even within that country, the only people that have are directly related to me, through my father's father. Keep in mind that polygamy was also more practiced back then, so I have quite a number of half-cousins (2nd, 3rd, etc). My dad said that his dad chose that name, though, which is why I thought it was African, but it doesn't seem to be, after searching for it on Ancestry.com and seeing a few people from Austria with that name on U.S. census reports from the 1800s. I'm related to African royalty on both my mother and father's side, and thus am able to trace those lines back a number of generations. But on my mother's side, both my grandparents have African surnames, but on my father's side, my grandmother has a maiden name that originates in England, and my grandfather, like I said, Austria. Did colonizers just offer these names to people? How did that work? Why would that particular grandfather be attached to that Austrian name? My dad said surnames weren't really a thing til sometime in the 1900s. I'm doing the AncestryDNA test to see how my DNA relates with other parts of Africa, and assuming I have no European ancestry, is it normal that Africans adopted European names like that, even Austrian ones? I mean looks wise, people in my family vary but that's common in Africa, you never know if it's just due to the diversity of African genes or some kind of Arab admixture. If you know anything relating to this, I'd appreciate it
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this could have been a forced change, like the way immigrants to the us have their names changed.
it could have been a legal change someone in the family decided to make.
names have really weird origins, like european Latin@ people have spanish names
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