Norman Family History

English, Irish (Ulster), Scottish, and Dutch: name applied either to a Scandinavian or to someone from Normandy in northern France. The Scandinavian adventurers of the Dark Ages called themselves norðmenn ‘men from the North’. Before 1066, Scandinavian settlers in England were already fairly readily absorbed, and Northman and Normann came to be used as bynames and later as personal names, even among the Saxon inhabitants. The term gained a new use from 1066 onwards, when England was settled by invaders from Normandy, who were likewise of Scandinavian origin but by now largely integrated with the native population and speaking a Romance language, retaining only their original Germanic name. French: regional name for someone from Normandy. Dutch: ethnic name for a Norwegian. Jewish (Ashkenazic): variant of Nordman. Jewish: Americanized form of some like-sounding Ashkenazic name. In at least one case it is an Americanized form of Novominsky, the name of a family from Uman in Ukraine. On coming to the United States around 1900, a member of this family changed his name to Norman, after which some relatives in Russia adopted this name in place of Novominsky. Swedish: from norr ‘north’ + man ‘man’.

Source: Dictionary of American Family Names ©2013, Oxford University Press