Originally Posted By: zmjezhd
I'm guessing American Indian surnames wasn't part of the research!

I'm not even sure that Native Americans had surnames before they adopted English or Spanish ones. The Navaho do have surnames in their own language, but they seem to be the exception.


I don't know about all of them but a couple of the more common names, Begay and Benally, just mean something along the lines of 'his uncle' or 'his nephew'. They got them when the white man decided they needed last names so they asked them who they were. They responded by giving their name and the relationship to someone else who was there with them. At least that's the story I got when I was living in Flagstaff back in the '70s.