Surname question

Aura Erickson

Hi,

I have been trying to look for the origins of the last name CAIPO. This is one of my family surnames and I am from South America. It is not a very common surname. Where should I start in my research?

dontiknowyou

Welcome!

Forebears.io is a good place to start, but I usually look first on FamilySearch in the Family Tree (under "Find") and in historical records (under "Search"). Using exact match, I see 69 person profiles in Family Tree and 1,157 historical records. Looking at the historical records by collection, I see most are from Peru.

https://www.familysearch.org/tree/find/name?self=%7CCaipo%7C0%7C1&birth=%7C%7C0%7C0

https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?q.surname=Caipo&q.surname.exact=on&m.defaultFacets=on&m.queryRequireDefault=on&m.facetNestCollectionInCategory=on&count=20&offset=0

Sounds like a quick, easy project right? No, because Spanish surnames so often are compound. Relax the search and there are 5,487 Caipo in just one historical record collection in Peru, and 45,163 persons in Family Tree.

Is Caipo a Quechua family name or a Spanish loan word / surname? I ask because as far as I know none of the tribes in the Amazon have used family names until very recently, but I know nothing about pre-conquest naming systems in the highlands. Of course, that question is also very relevant to both time and place of the origin of the surname.