Bonaduce, Croce, Fonda, Lookinland
I need to know the ethnic background & the meanings of these names. It's for a project I'm working on for a genealogy class. Bonaduce & Croce are Italian. The word (fonda), according to my Spanish dictionary, means "inn or restaurant". I'm not sure if the name Fonda has anything to do with it. Lookinland looks like it would be English. Does anybody know the meanings of these names ? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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I wish you'd stop telling us WHY you need these names.
Every time it's a different reason...
Just keep posting them, ok?
All 5000 of them.
Thanks!
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Bonaduce is a variant of Beneduce, probably but I am not sure, Benduce is typical of the area of Naples. It could be a well-wishing surname like Buonaparte (the italian name of Napoleon's family)or Buonarroti, the family name of Michelangelo. "Bona" like "buona" means "good".
Fonda comes, according to an ISTRIA SITE, from a medieval place near VENICE, but in the last century this surname has spread along the yougoslavian frontier, near the important city of TRIESTE. Now the name is very common in Trieste too.
Croce is typical from Southern Italy it is also from name of places:
It means in fact "cross". Crocetti is derived from Croce: it is the real surname of the american actor Dean Martin.
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"Fonda" is also Spanish and probably Italian for a kind of restaurant (more used in Mexico so I'm not sure, might be akin to the french recipe "Fondue" or that blind guess has no sense at all)... "Lookinland" sounds pretty obvious and might refer to the man who looks for soil in ships... Seeing how some surnames are just translations of contemporary equivalents it could be the anglicization (right word?) of a surname given to the one who had this occupation somewhere in Colombus' voyage. Bye
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