Low German Names from Hamburg, 1475-1529

by Sara L. Uckelman
known in the SCA as Aryanhwy merch Catmael

© 2006 Sara L. Uckelman; all rights reserved
last updated 06Apr06

The following names are taken from documents from 15th- and 16th-century Hamburg, available at http://www.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/hamburgisches_ub/HambUB.html. Some of these documents are in Latin, some in the Low German dialect spoken in Hamburg at this time. I have taken names only from the German-language documents, and not the Latin ones; however, even in the German-language documents some of the names are written in Latin, and I have marked these Latin forms.

Because it is sometimes difficult to determine when the same name in different documents refers to the same person or different people, I have not been able to do any frequency statistics on these names. I have therefore just grouped variants together, and listed them alphabetically. There are three lists: Women's given names, men's given names, and Surnames.

Men's Given Names

Women's Given Names

A substantial number of the women's names are diminutives; in many cases, only the diminutive form was used, and it's not clear what the root name actually is.