Surname Saturday seems to have taken off as a popular meme. Apparently to really participate, one is supposed to tweet. Frankly, I loathe
Twitter. I've never understood the value of it. I guess I'm only partially participating in the meme then, but that's OK. I'm going to throw some surnames out there, anyway.
Today's surname is my maiden name, SCRIVER, which I introduced in
a previous post about my immigrant great-great-grandfather, Peter Scriver. As I wrote then, I don't know that the name goes back any farther than Peter. In 1871, he registered his intention to emigrate and signed his name Peter Christensen Skriver, and that's the first instance I've seen of its use. Where did it come from?
Skriver means clerk or scribe, which would suggest that Peter (or an earlier ancestor) worked in this occupation. However, he was known to be a farmer for most of his life, except for the five years in Michigan, when he worked in the copper mines.
He didn't even use this name consistently in his younger days. For many years in the US, he was known as Peter Christensen. Family lore says that he quit using this name at some point after settling in Lynn Township, Moody County, Dakota Territory, because there were so many other people in the area named Christensen or Christiansen (which is actually a completely different name, not a spelling variation). Census records from the area suggest this might be true, as there were many people with similar names and even another Peter Christensen in the county.
The other Scrivers I've come across online are all of English ancestry. We're often confused with families named Shriver or Schreiber, and we all learn to answer to that. In my hometown, there were also people named Scriven, so I got that one, too.
According to
Dynastree's surname maps, there are approximately 536 people in the US and 603 in Canada with the surname Scriver.
