McLendon Spelling

Keeping mindful that early man migrated into Europe from Africa following the Ice Age, caveman surely used names. Originally a single name or what we call given name was used to uniquely identify a person. Names were usually descriptive in nature (examples wolf, fire, generous, bright, or tall). They were used to indicate son of something, then grew to have compound meanings like battlepowerful. In some societies compound names took on the name of their god. Eventually names were chosen from pools of names rather than inventing new ones. Time has affected names by changing cultures and languages to the point that it is impossible to document original meanings. Christian names came when people adopted names from the Bible. Conquests of countries affected the name changes. From the 1100’s to the 1500’s, surnames began to be inherited from father to son, aristocrats first, followed by the peasants. Over time, many given names have fallen out of existence.

Eventually the practice of single names became insufficient. Prefixes began emerging indicating where a person was from, what they lived near, their status in life, son of a follower or servant of, son of or daughter of, new given names were added to the father’s first name with a possessive “s” tacked on, all these forming a last name, family name or surname. Suffix son was also used to indicate son of.

In about 1000, Ireland was one of the first regions to evolve the hereditary surname. The Gaels of Scotland who were never taught to read or write, were descendants of the Gaelic settlers of Ireland, who never used family names until they began interacting with the English culture. So when Scottish surnames developed, the prefix of Mac was used to indicate the son of the father’s Christian name. By the 1800’s, if the letter following the “c” in “Mac” was capitalized then it meant a Christian name otherwise an occupation or something else. Later, prefixes were used for the occupation of the father or grandfather, including the feminine meaning (a female baker was a baxter), nickname, a physical, mental or moral characteristic of the bearer’s father, even religious connotations and for many other reasons. O stood for grandson of. Mac came to be abbreviated to M, Mc and Mcc. None of these prefixes defined Scottish vs. Irish or Catholic vs. Protestant as you might have heard. Often, the same person used different prefixes on different occasions. During this period people spelled words according to their sound. They would actually write the same word spelled differently on the same page. English rule influenced the prefixes Mac and O to be dropped during the early 1600’s but in the late 1800’s they began to reemerge. Over the centuries, prefix sounds, like “ap”, applied to the father’s name have evolved into modern day names like Reese and Price.  

When Irish immigrants came to America, their surnames were butchered upon arrival. Many could not speak English so they could not spell or dictate the recording of their names. Many immigrants changed their names to hide their identity and misspellings plagued our history. Many census takers were foreigners, complicating the way names were recorded even up to a century ago. The military did its part to complicate recorded variations in surnames during the Civil War with spellings like MacClennenm McLenden, MacLendend, etc. In our family tree, we find our surname evolving from Macklendon to MacLendon, McLendon and McClendon even though we are all of one family.