A Canadian Family

Randy Seaver (Genea-Musings) was writing today about some Hallowe’en-ish surnames he has found over at Rootsweb (e.g. goblin, skeleton, skull). I must say that some languages have interesting surnames because I’ve been searching high and low in the 1901 census for some French equivalents and the only thing I’ve come up with so far is St-Esprit – which actually refers to The Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost.

There is one Hallowe’enish name I discuss a lot with my elementary school students and that is Voldemort – the wonderfully terrifying antagonist of the Harry Potter series. I teach in a bilingual school (French/English) and we’ve always translated his name as “Flight of Death”, but I just did a little research and the majority opinion seems to be that it means “Death-eaters”.