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I'm not talking about patronymics..ufff...
Most Von, De (in Spanish), etc, are just bourgeois that wanted to "f.a.r.t" higher than their ar.ses during the 19th century. I find it quite idiotic, much more considering that some people make them up.
Very characteristic of new titles bought by the rich.
From what I've read, most "from" surnames arose in the middle ages, long before people bought titles and aristocrats had to worry about upstart gentry.
Though it's certainly possible that a few people added a "from" prefix to their name because they thought it sounded prestigious, that's not true for the majority. A "from" prefix really doesn't add prestige, real or affected.
Most family surnames in Europe arose in the middle ages. Some came form the kind of work the person did, some came from an ancestor they came from, but many came from the geographic area the person was from. I'd love to see evidence that all those DeGrassis and Del Monacos, VanBurens, Van Houtens, were all bourgeois upstarts.
The idea that people were using those names pretentiously is idiotic. That was their NAME. I know many people with "Van" names and most of their immigrant ancestors were farmers. It simply means from. I have Van de Heide in my ancestry, but it was Americanized to Vanderheide so that solved their monogram problem!
Most Von, De (in Spanish), etc, are just bourgeois that wanted to "f.a.r.t" higher than their ar.ses during the 19th century.
Oh god. No. Wrong.
The "van" and "de" depend mostly on the location of where the family is from.
Van Damme, for example, means "from the city of Damme", somewhere in Germany I believe. Nothing to do with "farting higher than their buttocks".
Del Vecchio means "From the old", probably the son of a guy named something like Pietro il Vecchio, like Peter the Elder or something like that, to distinguish different generations.
The names with "van" or "von" are probably families who have emigrated to the US from Germany, Holland or Belgium. There, those names are very common. I used to work with a Belgian company, they almost all have double names like
Van Rijswijck, Van Pottelberghe, Van der Smissen, respectively "From Rijswijck", a town in Holland, From the "Pottel hill/mountain" and "Son of the blacksmith".
I think that this comes down to whether or not you are a traditionalist or not. Names are both personal and a part of a person's heritage, and it's no one's business but your own how you style it for personal and family reasons. As for traditional styling practices, I can only speak to Dutch ones. I have a prefix of "van", that is lower cased and spaced, and the traditional family initial is the one that comes after the prefix, "van". So my monogram is first the initial of my first name, the enlarged initial of my family name, omitting the prefix, and the initial of my middle name at the end. This is the traditional Nederlands way to initial, should your dutch name be Afrikaans or derived from a region in Flanders the convention might be different. I live in the United States, where paperwork sometimes necessitates adjustments to how I write my name, which generally isn't much trouble. A family name can be carried from country to country and is a tradition unto itself, regardless of typical naming practices in the region.
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