Oak, birch, pine, hawk and lynx, spring, beach, sea, cliff, hill, sand and island - typical Estonian surnames today. For peasants, surnames appeared following freedoms under Tsar Alexander I (r. 1801-1825). These were fast-changing times for the Russian Empire, as elsewhere.
For their part, the emancipations in the Baltic territories of 1816-19 amounted at the time to little more than the “freedom” to be a serf or pärisöri – “more or less a slave” - tied to the lands of their owners who were for the most part Baltic German aristocrats.
Surnames to distinguish one Rein or Jaan from another started in 1823 in Livonia (southern Estonia / northern Latvia), and ended in 1835 in the north. Various types appeared, many of German or Scandinavian origin. One wonders how Estonians came by them, and did they include our family names, Napp and Lehova.
Lehowa manor, Lõhavere
We heard various theories on our travels. One is that the overlords felt it wise to accept the peasant reforms sweeping through Europe, and took it upon themselves to distribute names as they wished, or thought fitting.
Last names were just one of the markers on a long road to an independent Estonia, the wheels of European history turning faster after Napoleon’s doomed Russian campaign in 1812, and the Grande Armee’s end at Waterloo in 1815.
Writing at this time in England, the novelist Jane Austen wrote on injustices practised by the landed gentry in reducing access for the rural poor to land and resources.
In Estonia it took another generation for “freed” peasants to move physically and socially. Some travelled to the Imperial capital St Petersburg to study, from where career opportunities beckoned.
Others moved to take on landholdings, in the Lehovas’ case to the north from Lõhavere, the site of chief Lembitu’s fort in the late 1100s, and centuries later an estate known as Lehowa, the transliteration into German.
Estonianising of surnames started during the national awakening of the 1860s and 1870s, and a new wave started much later, in the early 20th Century, whence the many nature-based last names sprang. Our families apparently stuck to their guns.
How our family came by the Lehowa, and, later, Lehova name is hard to say. Tania Lestal in her blog, Paradise of the North, says her direct ancestor Jüri was steward in the 1700s of a farm named Lesta, attached to Luke manor, near Tartu. He was called Lesta Jüri, in an age before surnames, and it stuck.
On this reasoning, the Lehova ancestors would have held a senior position at the manor, also the gist of what our grandma, Erika, told us as children. She would have known her grandfather Jüri Lehova, born in the mid-1800s, and whose parents would have started life at Lehowa manor. That was five or six generations ago. So much has happened since, in anyone’s history. It’s worth remembering it.
Comments