HOPPES SURNAME EVOLUTION
The Hoppes surname is alive and well; in fact it's been evolving for over 700 years with no end in sight. Doing research on families that have this surname can be a lot of fun. When you find a family in the United States that has the surname Hoppes or one of its known variations (except in Michigan), you can be fairly confident that the family is descended for one of two brothers, Georg or Michael Happes, who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1751 from Schoenau bei Heidelberg, Germany. It's not at all like trying to research people named Smith, or Long, or Johnson, or Wolf, or even Atwood. As you know, most surnames evolved from occupations (e.g., Smith), physical traits (e.g., Long), family relationships (e.g., John's son or Johnson), animals (e.g., Wolf) or places (e.g., at wood or Atwood). Unfortunately, a lot of unrelated individuals were smiths, or long, or sons of John, or associated with wolves, or lived at the wood. Of these five categories, the surname Hoppes is a place name, pure and simple. Moreover, it is derived from a very specific place -- not some general locale such as "at wood". That specific place is a castle in Switzerland strategically located near the confluence of three rivers: the Aare, the Reuss, and the Limmat. The original German name for the castle was Habichtsburg, meaning " hawk's castle". By the late 1200s, the time our story begins, the name had already evolved to a simpler variation "Habesburc", still three syllables in length but much easier to pronounce.
In the year 1272, a wonderful thing happened to the castle's owner, Count Rudolph von Habesburc. The seven German electors who were responsible for voting for the German emperor chose Rudolf as king of the Roman peoples, ending a period of uncertainty during which no emperor ruled. Six years later, Rudolph defeated his principal rival, King Ottocar of Bohemia, in a fierce battle near Vienna, winning possession of Austria for the Habesburc family. Over time, Rudolph's family name became "Habsburg" (or its equivalent "Hapsburg"), and his descendants ruled as kings and queens of many of the countries in continental Europe. In 1289 or 1290, King Rudolph ordered that a census be taken of the land holders throughout much of Switzerland. Two enumerations, one made in 1290 and the second in 1292,showed that an individual named "Habesburc" was farming land near Obersehen (Upper Seen, now part of the city of Winterthur) on which he paid an annual rent of six measures of wheat, two chickens, and 30 eggs to the cloister at Saint Gallen, Switzerland. On July 15, 1291, in between the two enumerations, Rudolph von Habesburc died in Speyer on the Rhine southwest of Heidelberg, where he had journeyed several days previously so he could be buried in the magnificent cathedral there that served as the final resting place for the Holy Roman emperors of the first German Reich. Along the border of the lid of his sarcophagus, stone cutters carved an inscription, which declared in part: RUDOLFUS DE HABESBURC ROMANORUM REX.
The farmer near Obersehen, who also was named Habesburc, was residing at a location known as Richoltzwil, and later as Ricketwil. During the next century and a half, his name gradually changed to the two-syllable contraction "Hapsen" and its one-syllable base "Haps". In 1442, Hans Haps from Richoltzwil paid a tax of one pound to the local authorities operating from the nearby Kyburg castle. Later the land on which Hans Haps was living came into the possession of the St. Gallen indenturer Oswald Schmidt, and the Haps/Habs family reappeared in the nearby town of Toess. For the years 1500 to 1655, when the widow Elsbeth Haps nee Hoffman left Toess for the Palatinate, Riki and I found 818 references to economic transactions involving the various Haps families living in Toess and Winterthur. Most of these dealings were with the Kyburg authorities, or with the woman's cloister in Toess, or the hospital in Winterthur. In these 818 instances, the family surname was spelled in the following ways:
818
Variations on "Hapsen" included: "Happsen", "Hapssen", "Happssen", "Hapsssen", "Hapsenn", and an occasional "Hapsin" or "Happsin", even though a male was involved and not a female whose surname might be spelled with the feminine suffix "in".
By the middle of the 1600s, the two-syllable variation of the surname ("Happes" or "Habbes") would occasionally appear in the Swiss records, although this spelling was relatively rare. In the Palatinate, however, the one-syllable form of the surname ("Haps" or "Habs") had practically disappeared by the early 1700s and the name generally was spelled "Happes" or "Habbes".
When Georg and Michael reached Philadelphia in 1751, the surname Happes was subjected to a cultural shock from which it has not yet recovered and may not for some years to come. Basically, the first syllable of the name began to be spelled "Hop" in English instead of the equivalent "Hap" in German. This occurred much more rapidly in North Carolina, where English was the predominant language, than in the hills of eastern Pennsylvania where German continued to spoken throughout the 1800s and well into the 20th century. The fact that Georg was illiterate and his brother Michael only slightly better educated exacerbated the instability of the spelling of the family name. With the first vowel of the name being written as "a" or "o" and even an occasional "u", and the second vowel fair game for the speller, a huge variety of spellings occurred, especially because the middle consonant could be a "b" or a "p", and the "b", "p", and final "s" could be written singularly or doubled. The large number of spelling possibilities is illustrated below:
a
a b (bb) e (ea)
H o p (pp) i (ie) s (ss) or (se)
u o (ou)
u
One of my favorite variations is "Hopouse", but other equally bizarre combinations can be found. When I reached a hundred different ways I saw the named spelled, I literally stopped counting. Fortunately the soundex code H120 works wonders!
As if the variety of ways the name could be spelled given its basic structure: "H", vowel, "b" or "p", vowel, "s" were not already sufficiently complex, a wondrous event occurred. In certain locales, not only below the Mason-Dixon Line but in some parts of the mid-west as well, an "r" crept into the surname. Unlike some researchers who are reluctant, or too bashful, to speculate why, I must admit I think the answer is very simple. In English, the second syllable of the surname "Hoppes" sounds like "piss", not exactly an acceptable word to be spoken freely. Moreover, the hissing sound isn't very pleasing to the ear either. How much better to say "purrs" than "piss". And so, the name became "Hoppurs" or "Hoppers" in those locales were "purrs" sounded a lot better than "piss". Although it may seem crude to believe that someone might think of "piss" upon hearing the second syllable of the surname "Hoppes", a math professor of mine at Penn State University once confided to me that he remembered the names of everyone in his class through word association and to him I was "hot piss". I took it as a compliment!
Given this background on the evolution of the "Hoppes" surname, it is relatively easy to establish rules of thumb about dubious family names encountered in Hoppes research. My own guidelines are:
Always ignore: Hoppe, Hooper, Happer, Happers, Harper, and Hobus (even though Hobus satisfies the H120 soundex criteria),
Generally ignore: Hopper (unless family lived in western NC after 1880), Hobbes (unless family is from Lucerne County, PA), and German surnames beginning with "Ha" (like Habicht) after 1850,
Always accept: Hoppers/Hopperas, etc. (until 1880, and usually into 20th century).
With the availability of Internet searches, it is relatively easy to determine the relative frequency of the various spellings of the Hoppes surname among families in the United States today. The following profile I developed in May 1997 based on listed telephones may be of general interest:
Spelling Families Principal States
Hoppes 468 PA=76; OH=40; MI=39; NE=26; NC=24; IN=23; CO=20; CA=19; TX=19
Hoppis 52 AR=12; OK=11; CA=9
Hoppas 36 KS=12; TX=7
Hoppus 32 CA= 9; IN=7
Happes 4 OH= 2; FL=2
Happas 5 NJ= 2; MA=2
Hobbes 55 OH=12; MD=5; CA=5; PA=4
Hobbis 20 CA=5; FL=5; NJ=5
Hoppers 82 TN=15; NC=9; TX=7; MO=6; AL=6
754 + 4 with double "s"
Harry Hoppes March 9, 2000