Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 February 1910 — Oldest English Surname. [ARTICLE]

Oldest English Surname.

The name of Smith is, according to Professor Mahaffy, the oldest English surname. In a list of names he discovered when investigating the Petrie papyri, there is one, he tells us, “which appears regularly in the same form, and of which we can give no further explanation. It is the name Smith—unmistakably written. We have never found anything like it before, and it is surely worth telling thy many distinguished bearers of the name that there was a man known is Smith in the twentieth year of the third Ptolemy, 227 B. G., and that ae was occupied in brewing beer or selling it.”