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Updated June 9, 2019

Family name origins & meanings

  • German and Dutch : humanistic name, a translation into Latin of any of various names meaning ‘steward’ or ‘agent’, for example Hoffmann or Meyer.
  • Scottish and English : from Latin factor ‘agent’, literally ‘doer’, from facere ‘to do’. In 15th-century English, this word developed the specialist sense of a merchant’s agent in another town; it also came to denote a steward in charge of an estate, the usual meaning in Scotland.

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