Behind the Name
the etymology and history of surnames
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Subject: any idea where my great-grandfather's extremely strange name comes from?
Author: AngelOfIce   (guest, 86.120.79.132)
Date: August 29, 2008 at 5:53:21 AM
Okay, so here's the story. I've been doing some research on my family, and I found that my great grandfather, on my father's line. apparently was forced to change his surname in WW2. Which would mean that I should have had a different name today, had he kept the original. I'm kind of glad that I don't have that name though, because it is extremely complicated.

The problem is that I've been trying to find what the name meant, but I had absolutely no luck in deciphering the last part of it.


It's a compound name, VISEGRADAN-GOGONCEA. The first part is easy to understand, since Visegrad is a town in Republika Srpska (in eastern Bosnia, very close to Serbia), and I know my ggfather was at least part Bosnian.

After simple Googling of the other part of the name, Gogoncea, I only found references to Romanian people (mainly to some guitarist but also to a politician), so I think it's safe to assume it probably has Romanian origins, or at least it is used by at least one family in Romania. So I asked a Romanian friend of mine (I live in Spain, and there are plenty of them here), he told me how to read it, and he told me the name doesn't sound completely un-Romanian, but doesn't sound familiar either, and certainly is hard to understand where it could have come from.

Any help with it, does anyone know anything about this name?

I'm starting to think it's made up! :p I've had absolutely no luck in deciphering it.


Again, the name is Visegradan-Gogoncea, and I'm mainly interested in the last part since I could easily find the etymology of the first one.

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