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[Surname] Re: Spyksma
in reply to a message by Marc
Thank you so much!
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Hey there. Spyksma is indeed Frisian, but it doesn't mean "Spyk's man". The common Frisian suffix -ma often means "the farm of...", where the dots are filled in with what precedes the suffix, i.c. Spyk. I can't tell with certainty though that Spyk is actually a first name, because it doesn't necessarily have to be one. I'll try to see if I can find something about it.
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A bit more thorough: this suffix originally meant "people of...", and it was frequently applied to farm buildings by the family living there at the time (as in "the Mellema building" for example"). Later on, it could happen that other families took over the name of that farm while living there. So this surname Spyksma can either be taken from a farm building or be related to Spyk directly, which doesn't seem to be a first name. Its correct spelling would be Spijk by all means, but due to anglicisation it turned into Spyk, as often happened with Dutch surnames in English speaking countries. There are several villages called Spijk, but I doubt they are related to it, since most of them are not near Friesland at all. However, there's a village called Spijk in the province of Groningen, near Delfzijl and since this whole region one time belonged to Friesland, it might be the origin, though this is just a theory of my own, nothing certain.
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There are people in Holland named Spyksma so it's hardly an anglicization though Spijksma is far more common. This is one of many variants as shown at
http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/nfd/detail_naam.php?naam=Spijk. As far as I can tell from
http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/nfd/detail_naam.php?naam=Spijkman, it denotes a person from a place named Spijk, one of which is in Friesland as you can see at http://geonames.nga.mil/ggmagaz/geonames4.asp.
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Good to hear from you again, Menke.
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