ABOUT page---NAME MEANING
Regarding my family, the information posted for my VAN HORNE ancestors, says this is a Vietnamese surname, which is entirely BOGUS. My family surname is DANISH, but in the DUTCH style. My immigrant ancestor, Matthys Cornelissen did not have a surname, he had a patronymic, his given name attached to his father's given name. When the Dutch authorities, in 1600s New Amsterdam, wanted to differentiate two men with the same patronymic, they added "van", meaning from, and the place where the man came from. In his marriage record, my immigrant ancestor was identified as Matthys Cornelissen van Jutland. When his sons came of age, they chose "van Horne", to honor the town in Hjorring, Jutland, Denmark, where their father came from. Please make this field editable so I can put in the correct information for Matthys Cornelissen, and have it copy to all of his descendants pages.
Answers
-
Your comments led me to checking-out the "About" page - for the very first time! I won't be bothering to visit it again in a hurry as it contains either items that can be found elsewhere on an individual's profile, are that of no real interest to me.
With specific reference to your point of making the Name Meaning section editable, I very much doubt FamilySearch would be able to do this. As you can see, the source shows as: "Dictionary of American Family Names © Patrick Hanks 2003, 2006." I believe FamilySearch has chosen this as the consistently used source for providing this information, so user edits would mean this no longer being the case.
Yours is not the first report of a European name being treated as a Vietnamese one. The coding that produces such a suggestion is obviously rather flawed. However, the meanings (in general) contained in these dictionaries often have to be taken with a pinch of salt, as the same surname can often have multiple "origins". The compilers of these dictonaries do tend to take themselves far too seriously, in trying to convince us they have produced some sort of definitive guide on the subject.
In short, I would advise to either ignore the About page - well at least this section of it - along with some of the other trivial items we are occasionally presented with (through FamilySearch "campaigns"), which are not strictly related to genealogy.
1 -
Looking up a name in a name dictionary is one of those things that humans can do much, much better than a computer. The human knows that "van Horne" is all one thing and that the surname "Van" has absolutely no relevance to it, but the computer sees just the string v-a-n in both the name and the dictionary, and declares it an easy match.
Add to this the inherent shortcomings of a generalist book like The Dictionary of American Family Names (jack of all trades, master of none), and what becomes the surprise is if that "Name Meaning" box ever gets it right.
I agree with Paul: just ignore the fluff. The best use of the entire About page is to ignore its existence.
1