I'm searching for the meaning of my last name, Jagos. It is pronounced Yagosh. My grandfather came from the Prague area.

Thanks

What is my last name in Czech. It is Jelinek. I know my family is Czech I just don't know how to say the name.

Thanks Joe

I am trying to find out what the last name smajstrla means. It may have been originally smaistrla, or it may have been a longer name. All i know is that there is nothing on the enitre world wide web that can tell me. i have wasted 6 hours tonight and this is my last hope. Thanks ahead of time to anyone who can help.

~Amy~

Hi,

I do genealogy research for my family, and I am trying to find out the meaning, if any, of the surname Jarolim. I know that "jaro" means "spring", but what does the rest of it mean? I'd appreciate any help from a native of CZ. I know there are some famous athletes in CZ with the surname Jarolim.

Thanks,

Debra

I recently married my husband (Czech born) and his last name is Nypl.  He tells me it is not so common even in Czech.  We live in the US, he has been here sice he was 8.

Anyway as you can imagine here in the US Nypl is mis-pronounced in a rather odd way.  He is working on Citizenship papers and wants to change the spelling.  He has had it with the jokes.  I told him to leave it as is.

Is anyone familiar with the last name Nypl?

My last name is Piesen (silent on the i. not to hard on the P sound.  More like Pehsen).  I know it means song, but outside of our family I've never met another person with this name.  We are Jewish with origins in Prague and Brno (with 95% of the family brutally wiped out in the Shoah.  The word has variations in Russion and Polish, and there is a town called Piesendorf in Austria.

Any thoughts on this? 

Thanks :)

 Ann in DC?

Your family's pronunciation of the name is incorrect. The correct pronunciation is

TSEEP-call-a.

Don't draw out the ee too much. If you feel tempted to, just say "TSIP" instead, as it will be closer.

The surname is Slovak.

PURE SPECULATION ALERT

My speculation on the the origin is... well, I don't know. The -al ending would suggest membership in the big club of last names that are past tenses of verbs and presumably arose ages ago when villagers started referring to other villagers as "the guy who got lost that one time (Zabloudil)," "that guy who lost that one thing that one time (Ztratil)," "that guy who let himself get overcharged (Drahokoupil)," etc.

The speculation that there is a class of surnames that arose this way is not original to me; I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have popped into my mind had I not once read this article:

http://members.tripod.com/~zlimpkk/Genealogy/czechsurnames.html

(See section h.)

What's a little troublesome here is that there does not seem to be a modern Slovak verb "cipkať." However, it's possible that such a word existed at one time, and the word itself went extinct, while the surname based on it did not.

Erik