October 23, 2013--Zwerg

It seems everyone I know has become interested in genealogy.

Up to now I thought that strange--what, after all, is important about knowing you had a great-great grandfather who was a colonel or general in the Civil War or (like me) a horse thief? What does any of this say about anyone? Does it make you more worthy if you had an accomplished ancestor or diminish you if a distant relative was "only" a scrivener?

I got the "Roots" thing. For people who were ripped from their homeland, put in chains, and shipped here as slaves where their history was stolen from them, to find connections to Africa and distant families and nationalities made sense to me. That was about identity, not a search for previous family accomplishments.

It felt fundamental, not an act of vanity.

That's cynical me talking. I'm sure for those who use ancestry.com there are all sorts of interesting and good reasons they root around in their family's past.

Then someone sent me an e-mail asking if a certain Lisa Zwerling was a relative of mine.

I said yes and yes. That there are at least two of them--my first wife who, after we divorced, kept Zwerling as her last name, and another Lisa Zwerling who is an executive producer for ABC.

When I checked out the link my friend sent about the Lisa's, there was another that offered to provide information about the etymology of family surnames. Without looking anything up, I knew Smiths descended from ancestors who were iron mongers and Coopers, barrel makers. But when it came to Jewish family names, when my people in the past were required to take on family names, those frequently assigned to them by anti-Semetic officials were often derogatory.

Sephardic Jews in what is now Spain as early as the 10th or 11th centuries took on last names but it wasn't until the 18th and 19th centuries that Ashkenazi, or German Jews were forced to have last names if they wanted legal emancipation.

I knew about how Schwartz was from the German for "black" or "devil." Or why there were so many Jewish Golds, Goldbergs, Goldsteins, and Goldmans--because one of the calumnies associated with Jews was (and often is) the claim that we were gold hoarders, jewelers, and usurers.

But then there are other Jewish names that are quite benign, even affectionate. Gorelik, for example, is the nickname for someone who had a house fire; and Geller the nickname for someone with red hair. Then Stein is for someone living near rocky ground.

But what about Zwerling? For years I have been curious about that--what is its etymology? I was told we were once Zwerdlings, but some Zwerdlings for some reason dropped the D and became Zwerlings. But then what does Zwerling or Zwerdling mean?

Someone once said, "pesky little sparrow"; but though this could be a good name for many Zwelings (me included), I could never verify it.

Then, yesterday, via the same etymology website my friend sent, I discovered that Zwerlings may actually once have been Zwerglings. The addition of that G made it quite a mouthful and I can understand my people jettisoning it.

But if in fact we were once Zwerglings, that means we were named for zwergs, which in turn was derived from the Old High German dwergaz--dwarfs.

So though my father was for his time a towering six-feet tall and my brother and I are six-three and then some, we apparently come from a family of dwarfs.

Not that I have anything against little people, but you get my point about this ancestry research?