Is your surname“original”?

For today, let’s discuss Filipino surnames and their history. Have you ever wondered why there are unflattering family names such as Ocoy, Baboy, and even Bacla and Gajasa? Or have you always assumed that your Spanish-sounding surname meant that you have Spanish ancestors? Many Filipinos have stories of ancestors being “wanted men” during the Spanish period and thus having to “change” their surname to avoid capture, or their surname being assigned by a Spaniard, such as the case of the Rizal family which some historians still insist had their surname given by a Spanish governor who was a friend of the family. These stories are nothing but old wives’ tales, told to explain how surnames in the Philippines came about. Filipinos usually identify kinship with people who share their last names. As a very family-oriented country, Filipinos have the habit of recognizing people as relatives especially when they share the same surname.

While Filipinos today believe their Spanish-sounding surname is an indication of a Spanish ancestor, most surnames can only be traced to 1849 when Governor-General Narciso Claveria enacted a decree that required all inhabitants of the colony without a formal surname to adopt one. Prior to this, most native Filipinos did not have official last names. People were usually baptized with two given names like Maria Lucia, Josefa Bulalacao, or Jose de la Cruz. These secondary names were never used as surnames, so in one barrio there could be as many as 20 Maria Lucias, which confused the Spaniards. This, and many other administrative concerns, prodded Governor Claveria to issue his now famous decree, which has left many Filipino families believing that their Spanish surname indicates a Hispanic ancestor. While it may be true that one may have a Spanish ascendant somewhere up in the family tree, having a Spanish surname is not immediate proof. To find out if one’s family name is original or a byproduct of the decree, one can do the following:

First, check church records five to ten years before and after 1850 (the actual year of implementation of the decree) to see if your family name had already existed prior to and continued to exist after the decree. Among presidential surnames, all but four existed prior to the decree. The Marcos surname is an interesting case. While PBBM’s ancestors already used Marcos as early as the 1780s, they adopted Tabuebue in 1850 but shifted back to Marcos after the end of Spanish rule.

Another way is to look at the margins or body of church records. Some towns strictly listed on parochial records the new and old surnames of the person, such as Jose Rizal Mercado, indicating “Rizal” as the new while “Mercado” was the old surname. When these are not on the margins, some also indicated these in the body of the records. This is how we know that the four presidential surnames Laurel, Osmeña, Quirino, and Ramos were originally de la Cruz, Agaton, del Rosario, and Apelido, respectively.

There’s roughly a window of 10 years during which one can determine the origin of one’s last name. Concentrate on the period between 1850 and 1860, as this is when it is most likely to be determined whether a person's surname is a Claveria decree by-product. Naturally, not everyone is fortunate enough to have forebears from places with capable parish priests who strictly adhered to the surname regulation. So, if none of the above techniques work for you, then you do have to do it the hard way, which is to go through hundreds and thousands of church records to find your surname’s history.