Hunting for Napp headstones in the Otepää cemetery, I took a note of last names. Besides the nature-based ones listed in an earlier blog, I found ash, spruce and willow, and some interesting ones - gravel hill and silver lake - and others such as swan, elk, grebe and plover.
Locals, if they had a choice, would have preferred the grand-sounding or auspicious, eg certain trees or geographical features. One wonders about the choice of marshy field (Soonurm) or thorn (Okas), or catfish (Luts), or smoke (Suits). Names, incidentally, of an Estonian chess player, an illustrator, a writer, and a poet.
Some are obvious. Mõlder for miller, derived from German Müller. Or Kingsepp for shoemaker or cobbler. Taking another tack, Üleoja, for the family living across the stream; in the same vein, Keskpaik, those from the “middle place”.
“Although peasants were initially given surnames by landlords,” the ERR radio news website says, people were eventually able to choose their own last names. The general rule was to choose a last name after the farm the person lived and worked on.”
Historian Fred Puss says people also looked at objects close to them. “That is how many people were named after animals or birds.” The lords of the manor had a big influence in name selection; servants tended to receive less flattering surnames, while farmers with a family fared better.
Thus, we have another explanation of how the Lehova branch of our family came by our name – Lehowa was the Germanised form of the location name, Lõhavere, and the name of a former Baltic German manor and estate in that area.
The whole issue of how Estonians got their surnames is somewhat murky. According to Toivo Raun, writing in Acta Historica Tallinnensia in 2012, estate administrators and the clergy also had control over assigning surnames to the peasantry (c. 1835). “As a result, it is clear that a large proportion of Estonian peasants received German surnames.”
That would be one explanation of how our grandfather’s family came by Napp, possibly, a modification of Knapp. The ordinary meaning of this word in German is scarce, meagre, or in short supply, and napp has the same meaning in Estonian.
A movement to estonianise surnames started with independence from Tsarist Russia in 1918, gaining force in 1921 on the appearance of a book of 15,000 “Estonian new surnames” created by a group of linguists.
Initially, very few Estonians changed their names, either because the procedure was expensive and complicated, or only a few intellectuals were excited about it. The lead-up to the Second World War saw a sudden change. Between 1935 and 1939 close to 20% of ethnic Estonians changed their surnames - 192,000 individuals. By early 1940 around 80% of ethnic Estonians bore Estonian surnames.
Raun ascribes this mass movement to Konstantin Päts’ authoritarianism from 1934, and the messaging of his State Propaganda Office, “Every Estonian with a foreign name must shake off the foreign mask and become a real Estonian in name as well”, and “Every Estonian must publicly acknowledge their desire to belong only to his nation.”
Non-ethnic Estonians were under no compulsion to change their names, while others simply didn’t, or never got around to it. The Napps were, perhaps, in the latter category. In evidence, our grandfather was Russian Orthodox as opposed to Lutheran, and his father, Anton, had a typically Orthodox name, implying that his parents were either born Orthodox, or converted to the Russian creed.
That takes us back in time to at least the 1840s when the Russian Orthodox clergy offered land to incentivise conversion. Newly freed and landless peasants would have jumped on the chance, as an appealing alternative to poverty and servitude. That could have been the case for the Napps.
While Napp is a rare surname, some such as Tamm (oak), Ilves (lynx), Saar (ash tree) and Rebane (fox) are very popular, stemming from the reform period. Eesti.Life reports that even today Estonians can change their last names, at a cost of 100 euros, noting that 225 names are excluded, mostly because they are too common.
Comments