People that have the same last name you have are actually related to you?

Question

Is that true because I just went on a website and it states that if you have the same last name, you come from the same family tree.

Answer 1

Without repeating the various reasons (already written).. the person who said that on their website, is completely and totally incorrect.

Observation... if you are new to research, it appears that you are working BY surname, AND hoping to locate the oldest known Barker and then determine how you are related. This is very common, but it soon slaps you upside the head, that is not the way to go about it.

Back to square one, which is that you always always always start research with yourself.. and using documents/ verification... work back in time.  Your birth cert will prove who your parents are, and don't forget... mom is only a Barker by marriage. Next, using documents, "prove" your 4 grandparents (all of which will have a different last name).  In other words, tracing your family history means you are not tracing the Barker name. You are looking for YOUR ANCESTORS.  By using documents and records, you are insuring that you have the right info and the right relatives.  A simple error (grandma thinks her mother was born in Alabama, but mom actually was born in Georgia but moved at age 2).. can block you for years, because you are looking in the wrong location.

Eventually, you will get the back as far as you can with available records, both for Barker and other family.  At least you will be sure it is the right family.

NO SHORTCUTS...  

Answer 2

NOT TRUE!

Back in the day, there were no last names, and when they started using them they could pick their own, usually the town they lived in or something taken from there first name. Robert ap Owen ap Wilson meaning Robert was the son of Owen who was the son of Wilson. When they went to take a last name some of them became Robertson, Owen or Wilson as the last name. So you have another family called John ap Wilson ap Robert and their line might be Johnson, Wilson or Robertson, no relation to the other family.

And then there are those that took on a last name, through adoption, hiding out or whatever.

One proof of this is DNA testing. My husband's line matches up with only 3 other lines in the US. There are 20 other lines with this same last name, that have tested and do not match at all to my husband's line. So same last name, not related even back in the medival times.

Answer 3

just to add to what the other two people are saying above my answer. also remember slaves took on the last names of their "slave masters" and in some parts of africa and other countries babies were given their Fathers First name as a last name. so if daddy was named john fredrick then the baby would be named samuel John. also I am told, that in other parts of africa babies are sometimes given the names of people who are not related to them by blood. this includes the surname.

Answer 4

It does not hold true because back around the turn of the century (the early 1900s) when families started to migrate from one country to another, there was a dialect difference and even when someone pronounced their last name so it could be documented onto the ship's manifest, the person writing down the ship's manifest often had a difficult time in trying to understand the many dialects and would try their best to spell the name <my last name is Katanic and is pronounced as Kah-tanik and my relatives seem to be from Austria/Hungary and I am finding it spelled as everything from Katanick to Katanech and Katanich to Katanic and in my famiy's case, there is one clan from Hungary and one from Serbia and Croatia and neither appears to be related to the other.>

The people here on this site are very, very helpful.  Other sites to try are Zabasearch.com, Rootsweb.com, EllisIsland.org and MyHeritage.com, or even the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) along with Peopledata.com (to try to find a living relative to gather information from.)

Good Luck.

Answer 5

No, not necessarily, unless you accept the fact that the human race was spawn from a single set of parents.  If so, then you don't share the same root person with everyone with the same surname as yours.

People in Europe did not have surnames until the last millennium.  In England, for instance, most people had one by the end of the 14th century.  They were based on a)being the son of someone, b)their occupation c)where they lived d) some characteristic about them.  When they got through being assigned or taking a surname, it wasn't impossible for legitimate sons of the same man to have a different surname. Still they could have each shared their surname with others  that were not part of their family.

Johnson and Jones indicates a person's father's name was John.  How many men named John whose sons took the name Johnson or Jones.

Smith is an occupational name, usually for a blacksmith.  Not everyone with that occupation would have been part of the same family.  Some people were named for the town they lived close to  or maybe the castle.  A person can make a mistake thinking if they had an ancestor living close by the castle with the same name, that somehow they were related to the Lord of the Manor.  If a man was short, he might have taken the name Short.  If he had white hair, he might have taken the name White, but there were many other men with these characteristics.

Also, in many cases, it wasn't until a few more centuries when they same surname was passed down to the next generation.  

That is why researching a surname is not the best way to go about genealogy.  They are helpful in looking up records.  If you get back before people had surnames, it is almost impossible.