Quote Originally Posted by O'Callaghan View Post
I have a common enough English surname, but one that also has Spanish and Italian variants...
The thing to remember, apart from the fact that surnames didn't always exist, is that any surname we tend to latch on to, was one of hundreds and thousands, of potential ancestral lines. You are one individual with two parents. You have 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents, 16 great-greats, 32 great-great-greats, and so on. In just one of my family lines, my tree on ancestry.com goes back to my 13th Great grandfather. That individual is one of 32,767 other 13G-parents! And the number doubles with each generation.