In much of rural Austria, a family could be known by two names at once: the surname it was baptised with and the name of the farm where it lived. Researchers often meet these farm names, called Hofnamen, house names or vulgo names, in the Alpine provinces and in Styria, and they can make a single family look like several. This guide explains how they work, how they show up in parish books and how to follow a family through a name change that never involved a courtroom.
What a farm name is
A farm name is the traditional name of a holding, which stays attached to the property while the families on it change. A family tree magazine explanation of German and Luxembourg house names describes the mechanism clearly: when a new family moved onto a farm, they would adopt the parcel name as a surname, most often when a farm owner’s daughter inherited the land and her husband took on the farm name. Children born before the inheritance were baptised under the father’s original surname and later used the new one, while children born afterwards used the farm name from birth. The article concerns Germany and Luxembourg, but the pattern is a useful model for Austrian farm country as well.
Austrian studies often prefer the word Vulgarname or Vulgoname. Franz Eiselt, writing in the journal of the Historical Society for Styria about the Vorau district, notes that such a name usually refers to the holder of the farm and not to the building alone. His work on Wenigzell, in north-eastern Styria, includes a section on the confusion of names in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. You can find his studies on the society’s website.
How farm names appear in the records
Parish clerks handled the double names in different ways, and the clues are consistent enough to learn. Church books may list both the old and new surnames, separated by words such as oder (or) or genannt (called), the Latin vulgo (commonly known as), or alias. Burial entries often list both names, which makes them a good place to confirm an identity. The same article recommends cross-referencing confirmation entries, which show children’s new surnames, with their earlier baptisms under the old ones.
- Baptism entries may give the father with a farm name added in a different hand or in the margin.
- Marriage entries often name the groom’s farm, which can be the first sign that a man will take another name after the wedding.
- Burial entries frequently give both names, or the farm name alone.
- Later notes may record that a person was known by a different name from the one in the baptism.
Following the farm, not just the family
When a name keeps changing, follow the property. Farm histories can be reconstructed from land and manorial records held in provincial archives. The Tyrolean Provincial Archives, for example, published a series called Tiroler Erbhöfe on farms that had been in the same family for at least two hundred years under a provincial law of 1931. A farm history such as these lists successive owners and notes that a farm name may appear long before a family name takes its form. See the first volume of the series for an example of the method.
Our guide to state and provincial archives explains how to contact these archives and what to ask them. The question to put is simple: which records identify the owners of this farm in the years that interest me?
A worked example
Invented example: Imagine an invented farm called Oberleitner in a Tyrolean valley. In 1790 the owner is Josef Mair, and a baptism entry for his daughter Maria reads Maria, daughter of Josef Mair vulgo Oberleitner. Maria inherits the farm and marries Peter Huber in 1815. Their children are baptised as Huber, but burial entries for Peter in 1850 read Peter Oberleitner, formerly Huber. A researcher searching only for Huber would find the baptisms and lose Peter at his death. A researcher searching for the farm would find all of it. This is a made-up family, but the pattern is one the records show again and again.
Why the system existed
The practice grew out of how farms passed from one generation to the next. A holding was the family’s livelihood and identity, and the farm’s name was known to the whole community, to the lord of the manor and to the parish. When a farm passed through a daughter, a stepson or a purchaser, the farm name provided continuity that a personal surname could not. That is why the same word can attach to several families across a century, and why a parish priest might note both names to avoid confusion.
Questions to put to the records
- Who owned the farm before and after the person you are tracing?
- Is there a marriage that brought a new man onto the farm?
- Do children in the same household carry different surnames?
- Does a burial or confirmation entry give a name that the baptism did not?
- Does a land or manorial record name the farm and its owner in the same years?
Common problems
- The surname changes between siblings. The change may reflect an inheritance, not an error. Look at the dates.
- A farm changes name. Farm names can drift in pronunciation and spelling over time, as can the family names that derive from them.
- The same name belongs to two farms. Check the village, hamlet and house number in the entry.
- The farm name looks like a first name or a place. Read the whole entry before deciding what the word means.
What to do next
Start from the youngest record that mentions both names, then work back one generation at a time, asking at each step whether the farm or the family came first. Our surname origins guide explains why the meaning of a name can mislead you, and our spelling variants post covers the respellings that farm names collect. For the books themselves, see how to search Matricula Online.
Farm-name conventions vary by valley and period, so treat the patterns above as a guide and let the entries in your own parish set the rules.
