What's in a Name? History and Meaning of Wyckoff - Paperback

by M. William Wykoff (Author)

The cumulative evidence presented here proves that the origin of the surname Wyckoff is Frisian and refers to a household or settlement on a bay, although many uninformed American descendants of Pieter Claessen Wyckoff continue to believe the name to be Dutch. Frisian was only one of the many languages spoken by early settlers of New Netherland. In the Northern Germanic linguistic area of Europe, the surname occurs principally in the Lower Saxony area of Germany which includes East Frisia from where our American ancestor emigrated. Amid the proliferation of costly false and inaccurate information being disseminated on popular interactive genealogy websites, the author suggests corrective measures that could be taken by professional genealogical societies and family associations such as the Wyckoff Association of America.

Author Biography

The author was born in Corry, Pa. raised on a farm, and attended college on the G.I. Bill. He graduated from Penn State and Cornell universities, and studied at the Free University of Berlin. He taught linguistic anthropology at Oberlin College and conducted field work at Six Nations, Ontario, and Yunnan, China. He retired from the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Dept. at Cornell University and now lives in Rochester, NY.