María José Ginzo (A Pontenova, Lugo, 45 years old) has been interested in surnames since she saw them in obituaries as a child. This obituary information revealed to her and her family where the deceased person was from. Just by looking at the surname, they could tell if they were from one side of the river or the other. Ginzo was curious about the connection between surnames and people’s origins, and began to investigate: one Christmas she went around the cemeteries of her hometown to take photos of the tombstones, collect information and find out which was the most characteristic surname of each parish. With her research she discovered that surnames can reveal where a person was born, or what their physical characteristics are: whether they are blond or dark-skinned, or whether they are a good or bad person.
The mathematician explores new statistical methods to find out how surnames are distributed geographically, what their relationship is with the population, and with Spanish languages and dialects. She has been awarded the Award for the Best Doctoral Thesis in Digital Humanities, awarded by the International Society of Hispanic Digital Humanities and the BBVA Foundationwhich encourages research in the world of digital humanities. Ginzo is a professor of Statistics, Mathematical Analysis and Optimization at the University of Santiago de Compostela and a researcher linked to the Center for Research and Mathematical Technology of Galicia (CITMAga).
Ask. What does the methodology you use consist of?
Answer. We carry out an analysis to obtain the regionalisation of surnames in Galicia, to find out if the surnames are concentrated in some way, that is, to see if there is any grouping pattern, thus establishing groups. We have also used techniques used in ecology to study various species of animals adapted to the context of the surnames, that is, we treat each surname as if it were a different species.
P. Can you give an example of a surname that you have studied?
R. One is Outomuro (a town in the municipality of Cartelle, in the province of Ourense). In Galicia there are many toponymic surnames, that is, surnames that come from the name of a place. In addition, they are more abundant than in other regions of Spain. There is another group of surnames that are the appellatives, they are related to the physical or psychological characteristics of the people who carry them. For example, the surname Bueno denotes kindness, that person would be kind, or the surname Rojo, which would come from a red-haired person, or the surname Moreno or Blanco, which would be from people with dark or very white skin. This type of surname could be understood as nicknames or nicknames, I mean, when you went to school and two classmates had the same name and you described them to tell them apart, you called one the blond one and the other the gafotas, for example. This is how the appellatives that have to do with some characteristic of the people arose.
P. What is the origin of surnames?
R. At first, there were only people’s names, and they all had more or less the same name. There was little diversity, and surnames arose to distinguish them. First, patronymics, which normally end in -ez, -iz, -oz or -uz, which means “son of.” If my name were María Fernández, I would be identifying my family, which would mean that my father’s name is Fernando. If there were another María Pérez, we would be identifying that she would be Pedro’s daughter. There came a time when there were many María Fernándezes, and the procedure of patronymic surnames was no longer useful for distinguishing people, so the second group arose, that of toponymic surnames.
P. What date are the studies from?
R. The data I have used is from the 2011 census. The first records of surnames in Spain date back to the end of the 9th century.
P. Are there other surnames like Bueno or Rojo?
R. Within the toponymic surnames (they come from the name of a place), there is another classification known as minor toponyms, which correspond to those surnames of animal origin: such as the surname Cordero or Cordeiro, the surname Gato or the surname Vaca. There are also surnames of vegetal origin, such as those that refer to the names of plants or flowers. In Galicia, the surname Carballo is very common, which means oak in Spanish. It was probably an area where there was a lot of oak. Other examples would be Figueira (fig tree in Spanish) or Mazaira (apple tree in Spanish).
P. Is there a relationship between surnames and language in Galicia?
R. In Asturias, the map of regionalisation of surnames does coincide with the map of dialectal varieties of Asturian. The same thing happens in the region formed by the communities of Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands, where the regionalisation of surnames in that area coincides with the dialectal divisions of Catalan. However, in Galicia it does not coincide because we are grouped in a different way, perhaps it has more to do with orographic aspects or perhaps it is more related to how the population was established in ancient times, in tribes or in Celtic villages. It was difficult to relate to other people who were not living in a nearby environment. In the end, we have very local surnames.
P. What is the most common type of surname?
R. In the provinces of Lugo and Ourense there is a greater presence of patronymic surnames, and, in the provinces of Coruña and Pontevedra, a greater presence of toponymic surnames.
P. In your work, have you applied statistical methods that have not been used before?
R. We can establish a similarity between surname and disease, that is, if a person has a child, he or she transmits his or her surname to him or her (infecting him or her with the disease surname “X”), which is the way we have to spread it. In the thesis, we study the spatial and temporal evolution of surnames, and to do so we use statistical frontier methodology that is usually applied to the study of diseases, especially those that are transmitted by contagion or proximity (neighborhood in our vocabulary).
P. Which page should I go to to learn more about surnames?
R. On the website of INEoffers a section dedicated to surnames and names of people. You can search for a surname/name and it shows you on a map its distribution throughout all the Spanish provinces and the corresponding frequency table. There are other pages about surnames, but I am not 100% sure if that information is scientifically verified enough to be able to use it.
P. Have you encountered any limitations in your research?
R. The data from public bodies are subject to statistical secrecy, meaning that those places where there are fewer than five people with a given surname cannot be published, as it would be very easy to identify those people. I would like to have a very extensive register, but I only have the people who were alive in 2011. My grandparents, for example, do not appear in that data because they had already died, so I had to go look for the data in the cemeteries.
P. How did you identify the surnames?
R. I have used recent techniques of web scraping (web scraping is a technique that uses software programs to extract information from web pages) to search for surnames in the dictionaries of the Royal Academy of the Spanish and Galician Language and the Portuguese (in this case it is not an official dictionary, but a dictionary used as a reference for the Portuguese language). The idea is the following, I search for surnames as if they were simply words, as well as derived words. Then I study the definitions, I discuss the meanings with linguistic colleagues in order to find surnames and their definition and cataloging.
P. What is the relationship between migration movements and surnames?
R. We wanted to study people’s movements taking into account their place of birth. To find out if they moved to live in nearby or distant areas and to find out at what time there were more migratory movements. We also wanted to see if at any time women moved more than men. In some cases we saw that women moved more than men, perhaps when they got married they moved from their home to their husbands’ or to their husbands’ place of origin.
P. Do you think that at some point we will lose, for example, our second surname?
R. No. Although almost all my work is about the first surname, we did some tests with the second surname, and we came to the same conclusions. Currently, in Spain, you can put the mother’s surname before the father’s, but I don’t know if that change could have an impact at some point. If you search a surname on a statistical portal, such as the INE, you will see that it appears in the same proportion for both the first and second surnames.
P. What other challenges do you have with surnames?
R. My next steps are to use statistical tools to do micro-level analysis to understand certain surname movements, and to develop methodology to study surnames in any region. I would also like to combine data from Spain and Portugal to do a more global analysis. I have requested data on Portuguese surnames from the Portuguese Institute of Statistics, but so far, they have not provided me with the data.
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