Would anyone know a site to where I could enter my last name and recieve the meaning by the prefixes?

Question

Something where the site will be able to sound it out and give me a difinition and hopefully a family crest.

Answer 1

Tebs is absolutely correct. There is no such thing as a family crest. A crest is part of a coat of arms. Coats of arms do not belong to surnames.  They were and are granted to individuals and are passed down through the direct legitimate male line of descent.

Peddlers who sell coats of arms(misnomer family crest) on the internet, at shopping malls, at airports, in magazines frequently are selling valid coats of arms but what isn't valid is they sell them like they belong to everyone with a particular surname.  They don't.

Actually, there might have been several men with your surname, not all necessarily related, that were each granted their own coat of arms, all different.  Then it is possible that none of your direct ancestors were ever granted one.  No one peddler that sells them will have all of them. They don't need to in order to sell.  The only time they will have more than one is if more than one person with the same surname from different national origins were granted one.

Then they will have one of each and possibly there were several of each for some of the national origins.  They will usually have a small disclaimer in fine print.

See the links, I have under sources and if this is a school project, please print them off and give them to your teacher. One is from the British College of Arms(they grant coats of amrs and are the ultimate authority) and the other is from the most prestigious genealogical organization in the U. S., The National Genealogical Society.  I apologize if it isn't but we get a lot of students with assignments to find their "family crest."

I can give you some prefixes.  Mc, Mac, Fitz means son of.   O means descendant of.

Edit:  Here is a link regarding surname prefixes

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=sur...

Answer 2

There is no such thing as a family crest, a crest is part of a coat of arms, the adornment on the helmet.

If there ever was a coat of arms awarded to a man who's name is the same as yours, it belongs only to that man's descendants, NOT to everyone with the same name, you would have to prove descent from the original grantee to be allowed to use his arms.

Answer 3

Tebs is absolutely right!

As for the meaning/origin of a surname, there are several sources, including www.ancestry.com, surnamedb.com, and http://www.surnameweb.org/.

As far as sounding it out for you, there is a site http://www.yakitome.com/ that converts text to speech, and it "speaks" many languages, but I'm not sure I'd rely on it for the pronunciation of a rare surname...