Huck Onomastics

Huck onomastics: Observations on the origins of the family name Huck,

with a few digressions on ancient history, languages, and cuisine

G. J. Huck

Note: This is a preliminary report. Comments, questions, rants, or raves should be directed to the author at ghuck@sympatico.ca.

The earliest mention I’ve seen of a person named Huck is in a reference to a document from 1298 AD, though what may be the same name in a variant spelling evidently appears over 500 years earlier. For the most part, these early mentions involve Huck as a first (given or baptismal) name. So far as I have been able to determine, Huck first shows up as a family name (surname) around 1475, with possible variants 200 years earlier. But there are also names that are probably related to Huck that appear in records at least as early as 590 AD.

In books on name origins, it is usually said that the name Huck derives from the root hugu, which meant something like “intelligence, thought, spirit” in the Old High German language spoken in southern Germany the middle ages. Although things turn out to be a little more complicated than that, there is some evidence in support of such a connection. However, there are some other plausible hypotheses that we’ll look briefly at below.

A caveat: Anyone who wants to study the origins of a personal name of this vintage inevitably runs into a host of problems. (1) Only in the last few hundred years has spelling been regularized; before that, a person might spell his or her name in various ways as the mood struck (for example, William Shakespeare apparently spelled – or had his name spelled - Shakspere, Shagspere, Shakespeare, Shake-speare, Shackespeare, Shaxspere, Shackspeare, Shackspere, and Shakspeare on different documents during his lifetime). (2) When people travel across boundaries or change languages, they tend to alter the spelling of their name so that it conforms to local spelling practices and orthography (as a German named Bücher who emigrates to the U.S. may thenceforth spell his or her name Bucher or Buecher). (3) The same name may be pronounced differently in different regions or countries or time periods (e.g., English does not currently have phonemes (speech sounds) that corresponds to either German “ü” or German “ch”, so an immigrant named Bücher will probably find his or her name being pronounced here like English “booker” or “beaker”, and in time he or his descendants may change the spelling to Booker or Buecker or Beaker to suit the new pronunciation). (4) The same name with the same spelling may be pronounced differently in different languages or dialects (e.g., in French, there is no /h/ sound, so Henri is pronounced as if it were spelled Enri). (5) The practice of naming has itself evolved over the years and has responded to naming fashions that have differed from time to time and place to place; so in the middle ages a blacksmith who was the son of a man named John might have been surnamed Johns in one town, Johnson in another, and Smith in a third. (6) Historically different names with historically different spellings may end up being pronounced the same way in a language, leading ultimately to their being spelled the same way (e.g., the Chinese name Lee and the English name Lee are not historically related, even though they may be spelled identically in English). (7) Over centuries, as the sounds, words, and spellings of languages change, the names in those languages are necessarily affected as well.

So whether a certain name today is the “same” or even “related” to a certain historical name is not always a question that can be positively answered, though one should expect to find variations in its spelling over the centuries. Here follow some attested forms that I’ve turned up that linguistic principles suggest might be related to Huck.

Huc, Huk

Huuk, Huuck, Houck

Huch

Chuck

Hick, Haack, Hauk, Hauck, Hock, Hoke, Hoak, Hoch

Hug, Hugh, Hugk

Hucke, Hück, Hücke

Huge, Hüge

Hugo, Hugu, Hugue, Hucko

Hew, Hu, Hue, Hewe

Ugo, Ughi, Uc

Higg, Haugg, Hoog, Hog, Huyghe, Hoge, Hoag

Hoch, Hoxie

Hucks, Hûcks

Hugos, Huges, Hugues, Hughes, Hughs

Hewes, Hews

Hicks, Hix, Higgs

Hewson, Hughson, Howson, Hooson, FitzHugh, Pugh,

Huckel, Hugel, Hügel, Hückel, Hugle, Hugli, Hugolin, Huglin

Hugon, Hugueny, Huguennet, Hugny

Huggett, Hugot

Hucking, Huckings

Hugbert, Hugobert, Hubert, Hughbert, Hucbert, Chuchobertus, Chugobercthus

Hugibold, Hugeboldus, Huguboldus, Hugbaldus, Hucbaldus, Hubaldus

Hückeswagen, Huckfeld, Huckstep, Huckriede

The land of the Hucks

The name Huck is to be found today in many countries of the Old and New Worlds, but there is a particular concentration in the Alsatian region of France on the border with Germany. There are also significant populations in areas of western Germany and in German-speaking Switzerland that border Alsace. For example, about 1 of every 2,000 people in Alsace today is surnamed Huck, but only about 1 of every 40,000 Berliners carries that surname. On this evidence alone, it would be reasonable to look in Alsace for clues about Huck’s origins. Indeed, the farther back in history one proceeds, the more one finds mentions of people named Huck clustering in that region.

Alsace lies east of Paris between the French Vosges mountains and the Rhine. The climate is temperate, with average temperatures of about 70° F in July and 34° F in January. A land of hills, wetlands, and farmland, Alsace is known for its fine wines, but tobacco and grains are also important crops. The Rhine on its eastern border has made Alsace an important commercial region from the earliest times. The principal cities are Strasbourg in the north, Mulhouse in the far south, and Colmar between them. Strasbourg, originally called by the Romans Argentoratum, was renamed Strateburgum, “City of Streets,” in the sixth century AD. The famed and beautiful Cathedral of Notre Dame in Strasbourg dates from the eleventh century AD. Among that city’s most notable residents was Johan Gutenberg, who lived there between 1434 and 1444 while working on the development of his first printing press. In the early years of the sixteenth century, Strasbourg (or Strassburg, as it is spelled in German) became a center of Protestantism and the site of a historically important meeting between Luther and Calvin.

Alsace (or Elsass in German) has been buffeted by wars and invasions over several millennia. Julius Caesar in his Gallic Wars lists five Celtic tribes, the Sequani, the Mediomatrici, the Lingones. the Helvetii, and the Treveri, who were active in the areas of France, Germany, and Switzerland surrounding Alsace. The name Alsace itself comes from the Roman Alisiacum, which apparently derived from an older Celtic name. As the Roman Empire extended its boundaries northward under Caesar in the middle of the first century BC, Alisiacum came under its influence. At the same time, Germanic tribes, and in particular the Suevi and the Triboci, pressed southwestward into the region from northeastern Germany. Caesar was at pains to keep these tribes east of Alsace and the Rhine, often enlisting local Celtish forces to fight with his Roman legions against them. Caesar’s description of the Germans on these campaigns near the Rhine tells something of their customs and character:

They spend all their lives in hunting and warlike pursuits, and inure themselves from childhood to toil and hardship. Those who preserve their chastity longest are most highly commended by their friends; for they think that continence makes young men taller, stronger, and more muscular. To have had intercourse with a woman before the age of twenty is considered scandalous. They attempt no concealment, however, of the facts of sex: men and women bathe together in the rivers, and they wear nothing but hides or short garments of hairy skin, which leave most of the body bare.

The Germans are not agriculturalists, and live principally on milk, cheese, and meat. No one possesses any definite amount of land as private property; the magistrates and tribal chiefs annually assign a holding to clans and groups of kinsmen or others living together, fixing its size and position at their discretion, and the following year make them move on somewhere else. They give many reasons for this custom: for example, that their men may not get accustomed to living in one place, lose their warlike enthusiasm, and take up agriculture instead; that they may not be anxious to acquire large estates, and the strong be tempted to dispossess the weak; to prevent their paying too much attention to building houses that will protect them from cold and heat, or becoming too fond of money – a frequent cause of division and strife; and to keep the common people contented and quiet by letting every man see that even the most powerful are no better off than himself.

The various tribes regard it as their greatest glory to lay waste as much as possible of the land around them and to keep it uninhabited. They hold it a proof of a people’s valor to drive their neighbors from their homes, so that no one dare settle near them, and also think it gives them greater security by removing any fear of sudden invasion. When a tribe is attacked or intends to attack another, officers are chosen to conduct the campaign and invested with powers of life and death. In peacetime there is no central magistracy; the chiefs of the various districts and cantons administer justice and settle disputes among their own people. No discredit attaches to plundering raids outside the tribal frontiers; the Germans say that they serve to keep the young men in training and prevent them from getting lazy...

To wrong a guest is impious in their eyes. They shield from injury all who come to their houses for any purpose whatever, and treat their persons as sacred; guests are welcomed to every man’s home and table.

There was a time when the Gauls [the Celts in France] were more warlike than the Germans, when they actually invaded German territory, and sent colonists across the Rhine because their own country was too small to support its large population. It was in this way that the most fertile district of Germany, in the neighborhood of the Hercynian forest [the Black Forest, across the east bank of the Rhine from Alsace] was seized and occupied by the Volcae Tectosages [a Celtic tribe], who remain there to this day and have a high reputation

From Julius Caesar’s The Conquest of Gaul, S.A. Handford, transl. (Penguin, 1951)

Caesar is not regarded as an altogether reliable historian – the Gallic Wars was something of a propaganda piece in which he sought to aggrandize his conquests – but there’s no doubt that Alsace, and indeed the whole region of the Rhine Valley, was a frequent battleground during Caesar’s campaign. And so it was to remain for the next 400 years. Writing a hundred years after Caesar, the Roman writer Tacitus provided a description of the Germanic Seuvians, who had been growing in power:

I must now proceed to speak of the Suevians, who are … divided into several nations all bearing distinct names, though in general they are entitled Suevians, and occupy the larger share of Germany. This people are remarkable for a peculiar custom, that of twisting their hair and binding it up in a knot. It is thus the Suevians are distinguished from the other Germans, thus the free Suevians from their slaves. In other nations, whether from alliance of blood with the Suevians, or, as is usual, from imitation, this practice is also found, yet rarely, and never exceeds the years of youth. The Suevians, even when their hair is white through age, continue to raise it backwards in a manner stern and staring; and often tie it upon the top of their head only. That of their Princes, is more accurately disposed, and so far they study to appear agreeable and comely; but without any culpable intention. For by it, they mean not to make love or to incite it: they thus dress when proceeding to war, and deck their heads so as to add to their height and terror in the eyes of the enemy.

While the hostilities between the Romans and the Germans, and the contest between them for the lands around the Rhine, limited the interaction of their peoples, they weren’t strictly isolated from each other either. Many of the Germans were aware of the relative wealth and security of the Roman citizenry on the other side of the border and sought its benefits. They certainly had an advanced culture of their own, which the Roman description of them as being “barbaric” does not sufficiently credit. Despite Caesar’s claim, there is evidence that they engaged in agriculture and traded with their Roman commercial counterparts. When the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity by 316 AD, the effects were felt not only in the empire but across the Rhine in Germany as well, as missionaries from Rome began to attract German converts in significant numbers.

Here’s a Roman recipe for stuffed pig that might very well have made its way into the area of the Rhine during this period:

Clean a suckling pig, gut it from the throat, truss the feet to the neck. Before cooking it, open the ear under the skin. Fill an ox bladder with Terentian stuffing [consisting of garum, a salty fish extract, perhaps like anchovy paste; sapa, a reduction of sweet wine; olive oil; garlic; and bay berries] and attach a bird’s quill at the neck of the bladder; through this squeeze as much stuffing into the ear as it will hold. Then plug the hole with paper and close with fibulas, and prepare another stuffing. Make it thus: Grind pepper, lovage, oregano, a bit of silphium root; moisten with garum; add cooked brains, raw eggs, cooked spelt, cooking broth, small birds if available, pine nuts, peppercorns. Mix with garum. Stuff the pig, plug with paper, and close with fibulas. Place in the oven. When it is cooked, untruss, spread with oil, and serve.

From I.G. Giacosa, A Taste of Ancient Rome (Chicago, 1992)

By the beginning of the fourth century, an apparently more pacific branch of the Suevi, the Alemanni, had come to occupy the territory between the Rhine and the Danube as well as parts of northern Switzerland, with other Suevi tribes and the Asding Vandals to the east of them. Successive Roman emperors had kept the Germans at bay in part by hiring them as mercenaries and in part by simply bribing them to stay put. But by the beginning of the fifth century, with the Huns pressuring them from the east, the German tribes were becoming more restive. New alliances among them in the fourth century had also forged some formidable fighting forces, including the Franks and Burgundians to the north. On New Year’s Eve of 406, a huge contingent of Germans began to cross the frozen Rhine at Mainz, about 100 miles north of the northern Alsatian city of Strasbourg. There was no resistance, the Roman legions having been recently withdrawn to the south to defend Italy from an invasion of the Visigoths. Soon, the Alemanni poured over the Rhine into Alsace.

It’s not known what happened to the Alsatian Celts, whether they fled westward with other Celts ahead of the invading Germans, or were enslaved and assimilated, or (more likely) a combination of the two. What is known is that by the sixth century, Celtic culture had almost entirely vanished in continental Europe except on the Breton peninsula in northwest France. And although the Roman empire was also in the process of collapse, the Old French language of the Romans that was developing from Latin in Gaul was thoroughly entrenched.

If the Alemanni had thought they were safe from the Huns in their new lands west of the Rhine, they would soon be sorely disappointed. By 451 AD, Attila and his fierce Hunnish troops had crossed the river, had easily subdued the Franks and the Alemanni, and were pressing further into Roman Gaul. This invasion was only arrested when Attila died in 453. A year later an alliance of the Germans and Romans routed his remaining forces, which retreated in defeat to the Russian steppes, no doubt to the great relief of the Alemanni as well as the Romans. But by 476, the Roman Empire was itself dispatched, when the German King Odoacer deposed the last of Roman emperors.

Alsace remained under the control of the Alemanni until 505, when Chlodweg (Clovis), King of the German Franks, defeated and absorbed them. Chlodweg had converted to Christianity nine years before, and his realm, which at his death in 511 spread throughout much of the modern countries of France and Germany, thereby became officially Christianized. In the hands of Chlodweg’s Merovingian successors, Alsace was ruled under the Frankish Kingdom of Austrasie It is to be remembered that the Franks, for whom France was named, were a German people, like the Alemanni, after whom Allemagne (the French word for Germany) was named.

Despite Chlodweg’s victory, most of Alsace and northern Switzerland remained Alemannic in culture and language. Only in the northernmost parts did the Frankish German dialects really take hold. This linguistic division of Alsace has persisted into our time, with the Alsatian language today resembling Swiss German more than standard High German.

The Frankish Kingdom prevailed in western Europe until 843, when it was split into three parts, each ruled by a grandson of Charlemagne, the last great Frankish king. The eastern (or German) portion of the Kingdom, including Alsace, became the Empire of Germany, while the west became the Kingdom of France, which fell to the Capetians with the election of Hugo Kapet (or, as he’s known in France, Hugue Capet) in the tenth century. Alsace remained a German province until 1648, when Richelieu seized it for France in the Treaty of Westphalia.

During the long period of German domination before 1648, the language of Alsace was Germanic, but Latin, as it was evolving into French in the Kingdom of France, also seeped into the culture of the Alsatians. The border with the French Kingdom, and with the French-oriented German Kingdom of the Burgundians to the south, was close enough and porous enough that bilingualism was a fact of life. For example, when in 842, Karl the Bald of France and his half-brother Ludovicus of Bavaria signed the Oath of Strasbourg, pledging their alliance against their brother Lothair, they wrote it in both French and German. While the peasantry might operate in Alsatian German only, the educated classes would have known both Latin and French, and by the sixteenth century, German students were regularly studying law in Italian universities and medicine in French universities.

Here’s a recipe for an applesauce mousse (called “Emplumeus” in French and “Apfelmus” in German), a popular dish for convalescents that probably was consumed in Alsace in the fifteenth century:

Whoever would make it should take good barberine apples depending on the quantity to be prepared. Then he should peel them carefully and cut them into pieces into fine gold or silver platters. He should take a good earthenware pot, very clean, and boil some pure water over good bright coals, then add the apples. He must also have good, sweet almonds, in large quantity depending on the quantity of apples being cooked; he should skin them an wash them well, then crush them in a mortar that has no garlic odor; when they are very well crushed, he should moisten them with the liquid in which the apples are cooking, and when the apples are sufficiently cooked he should remove them to a nice clean surface, and strain the almonds with this water, making a good thick milk, and return it to the boil over bright, clean, smoke-free coals, with a tiny bit of salt. And while it is boiling, he should chop the apples finely with a small, clean knife; when they are chopped, he should add them to the milk and add a great deal of sugar, as required; then, when the physician calls for it, he should serve it in fine bowls or dishes made of gold or silver.

From O. Redon, F. Sabban, & S. Servetti, The Medieval Kitchen (Chicago, 1992)

Protestantism had begun to make inroads in Catholic Alsace in the early sixteenth century. Strasbourg in particular became a center of Alsatian Protestantism. In 1518, a copy of Luther’s famed 95 theses was nailed to the doors of the Cathedral, and the city officially adopted the Reformation teachings in 1523. The Swiss city of Basel, at the very southern tip of Alsace, converted to Protestantism in 1529.

Here follows an account of a Protestant wedding in Basel, between Dr. Felix Platter and Madlen Jeckelmann on Sunday, November 21, 1557:

The wedding reception was held at the house of Thomas Platter, father of the groom and headmaster of a local academy. There were 150 guests, counting wives and children. Most of the guests were from middle-class families of merchants and artisans.

The groom wore a red silk doublet, flesh-colored breeches, a wedding shirt with a short ruff, gold pins, and gilt collar, and a velvet doctoral cap with a braid of pearls and flowers. The bride word a flesh-colored blouse that matched the groom’s breeches. Little Madlen Hug, a fishmonger’s daughter, aged ten, wore a pearl headpiece that stole everyone’s attention.

After the ceremony at the church at which the bride and groom exchanged rings and pledged to have and hold each other until death did them part, they and their guests retired to the Platter house for the midday meal: appetizers of chopped fish, soup, meat, and chicken; a fish course of boiled pike; a roast course of beef, pigeon, cock, and goose, along with boiled rice and liver slices in aspic; and a desert course of Gruyere cheese and fruit. After this there was musical entertainment – a choral recital featuring a choir of students from the Platter school – and, a little later, dancing. (Felix danced a French-style gaillarde by himself, because his shy wife refused to accompany him.) Then the evening meal was served, an even more sumptuous feast than the midday meal: a first course of chicken liver, tripe, meat soup, and chicken; a second course of boiled carp; a third course of roast beef, Black Forest game stew, and fish cakes; and, finally, a fourth course of pastries. The wine served throughout was Rang, from the vineyards of the Thann mountain in Alsace, near Engelburg Castle.

In the evening, after Felix served sugared claret to the godmothers and other matrons who assembled to console the bride and give her advice, the young couple slipped off to an attic room under the rafters behind the maid’s room. The groom’s mother entered the privy adjacent to the nuptial chamber, where, venting her joy, she sang at the top of her lungs without regard for propriety. At the sound of her voice, Madlen, in bed, recovered her high spirits and burst out laughing.

Adapted from E. Le Roy Ladurie, The Beggar and the Professor: A 16th Century Family Saga (Chicago, 1997)

The 30 Years’ War, 1618-1648, was disastrous for Alsace, where there was a great deal of fighting between opposing Catholic and Protestant forces. Despite a citizenry that was sympathetic to Protestantism, the situation was so dire that many Alsatians welcomed the intervention of Catholic France in the hope that it could restore peace and order. After 1648, the situation for Protestantism in Alsace changed, since France was a much more Catholic country than Germany, and though tolerance had been promised, inevitably some of the same religious tensions continued to be felt in Alsace. Pockets of Catholicism, suppressed during the Protestant years, grew within the province, as it now served as a magnet for Catholic immigrants from Switzerland and Germany; for example, the Alsatian town of Röschwoog north of Strasbourg had a population that was 99% Catholic in 1807.

While portions of Alsace were patriotically French during the revolutionary years of 1789 and after (indeed, the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” was composed in Strasbourg by Claude-Joseph Rouget de l’Isle in 1792), the disruptions initiated the first of the major emigrations from the province. The causes were political, religious, and (of course) economic, and the destinations of the emigrants ranged from Russia to the New World. Between 1815 and 1870, about 45,000 Alsatians received passports for emigration. It was evidently common practice during this period for the French authorities to require the inhabitants of Alsace to use French versions of their names on official documents, even if they commonly used German versions at home. Similarly, after 1870, when Alsace was back under the control of Germany, the practice was reversed. Thus it is never enough to see that an Alsatian’s given name is of French or German provenance in historical records to be able to determine whether that person spoke French or the Alemannic German dialect. Indeed, it’s probably safe to assume that almost all of the inhabitants of Alsace before 1648 were Alemannish rather than French, however their given names appear in the recent historical record.

From the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 to the end of the Second World War, Alsace was passed back and forth between France and Germany three times, ending up as part of the French region of Alsace-Lorraine. One can only imagine the awful effects on Alsatians’ lives of the wars that resulted in this back-and-forthing. (But, then, of course, the period from the Romans to 1870 wasn’t idyllically peaceful in Alsace either.)

Medieval naming practices

The Alemannic Germans who populated Alsace after the invasions of 406 apparently had naming practices similar to those of their more northerly cousins, which are widely documented.

Until about the twelfth century, inherited family names were uncommon in Germany and France, the principal exceptions being royalty who wished to advertise their heritage as part of their bona fides. Surnames among common folk were supplied as the need arose, and when they were needed – for example, to distinguish between two men both named Thomas – such surnames would typically be formed by reference to the place where the person was born or lived (Thomas of Milburg or Thomas Riverside), or to some personal characteristic (Thomas Short or Thomas Stout), to the person’s father or family (e.g., Thomas, John’s son = Thomas Johnson or sometimes simply Thomas Johns), or to his or her occupation (Thomas Baker or Thomas Smith).

For given (or first) names, the Germans during the first millennium AD had both a productive system for creating two-part names and a stock of simple (or single-part) names. The two-part names were generally meaningful, in that each part was associated with a recognizable word of the language. For example, in 709, the Alemannic duke Gotfrid was succeed by his two sons Lantifrid and Theudebald. The name Gotfrid was a two-part name, consisting of the stem Got, associated with the Germanic word got meaning “god”, and the element frid, associated with the Germanic word fridu meaning “peace”. So the name Gotfrid was associated with the phrase meaning something like “god’s peace” or “peaceful god”. Similarly, Lantifrid was associated with the phrase meaning something like “peaceful land” and Theudebald with the phrase meaning “brave people”.

There were well over a hundred standard name-elements that could be combined in two-part names, which meant that there were literally thousands of possibilities, although fashion limited the number in practice. An interesting study of Germanic names in the Lowlands before 1100 showed that the most popular male first element there was Adal (“noble, heritage”), followed by Thiad (“people”), Ger (“lance, spear”), Liud (“folk”), and Ragin (“council”). The most popular male second elements were bert (“bright”), hard (“strong”), ric (“rich, king”), wulf (“wolf”), and bald (“brave”). [The analogues of these elements in southern Germany differed somewhat in spelling and pronunciation; for example, berht or beraht was the Old High German analogue of the Low German bert.]

Of particular interest to us is the Old High German root hugi or hugu (sometimes also written as huku), which meant “mind, spirit, intelligence”. Unlike many of the Germanic roots, hugi/hugu/huku was used only as the first of the two elements of a name, and then only in male names. Moreover, there were only a small number of second elements that hugi/hugu/huku combined with, chiefly berht and bald. Thus the name Huguberht was associated with the phrase meaning something like “bright mind” and Hugubald with the phrase meaning something like “brave spirit”.

Spelling and pronunciation of these names varied from place to place and from time to time. We’ll take this up in a little more detail below, but one complication that should be noted at this point is that many of the records that exist from the medieval period were written in Latin, and thus the names in them were Latinized. For example, Hugubald might appear as Hugubaldus.

More importantly, as the two-part names became more and more standardized, short-forms (sobriquets or hypocorisms) began to appear. Often these short-forms ended with an “o”. For example, either Huguberht or Hugiberaht might have been shortened to Hugo, but Hug and Huc were also possible, as were Hüg and Haag. Familiar endings might also be added to the root, yielding Hugilo, Hugizo, or Hugli. In Frankish France, the name Hugo, with its variants Hugue, Hue, Huge, became enormously popular with the ascension of Hugo Kapet (Hugue Capet) to the throne in 987 – indeed, by the eleventh century, it had become the most popular name in the French cities of Vendôme, Lille, and Douai, among others.

There were two principal ways in which a given name might turn up as (or as part of) a surname in the middle ages. As mentioned above, a surname was sometimes formed by reference to a person’s father. These so-called patronymics came in several forms. In Latin, a man named Johannus who was the son Hugo might have been called Johannus filius Hugi or simply Johannus Hugi (where the “i” of Hugi indicated the genitive or possessor case). In Medieval French, Jean who was the son of Hugue might have been called Jean (fils) de Hugon (or Hugues) or simply Jean Hugon (or Hugues or Huon). In Old High German, Johan, the son of Hugo, would have been Johan Hugos-sun or Johan Hugonis or Johan Hugi. Similarly, in England, John the son of Hugh would have been John Hughes, John Hewes, John Hewson; in Wales, John ap Hugh, John Pugh; and in Scotland, John FitzHugh.

Patronymics were by their nature not stable for more than a single generation, but sometimes families extended them to honor distinguished ancestors (or to honor themselves by association with a distinguished ancestor). Thus you might find Johannus domus Hugi (“Johann of the house of Hugi”) or Johan Hugingen (“Johan of the family or settlement of Hugos”). These new surnames, which are sometimes called “ancestral eponyms”, became increasingly popular in the eleventh century among the aristocracy as laws concerning inheritances were promulgated, but common folk soon adopted the practice as well. Among the various forms that ancestral surnames could take was that of the sobriquet or hypocorism of the ancestor by itself – Johan Hugo or Johan Hug or Johan Huc.

A second way in which a given name might have appeared in a surname was via reference to a location that itself incorporated a given name. For example, the place name Hucks acker (“Huck’s acre”) might be turned into a surname, as in Johan von Hucksacker (“Johan of Hucksacker”). Similarly, Huckschlage (from Hukes-lage “Huck’s place), Huckriede (“Huck-marsh”), Huckstedt (“Hucktown”), Huckfeld (“Huckfield”), Huckenbach (“Hucks Brook”), Hückeswagen (perhaps from Hukengeswage “Huck settlement by the water”).

Pronunciation and spelling in the history of the languages of Germany and France

Huck in German has been pronounced similarly to the way the word hook is pronounced in Modern English probably since it first appeared in that spelling in the thirteenth century. Undoubtedly some of the people who are now named Hook in English-speaking countries had Germanic ancestors who originally spelled their name Huck or something like it. The pronunciation of Huck in which it rhymes with the English word luck is atypical in German, and is found in English only after about 1600.

As mentioned above, only in the last couple of hundred years has spelling been regularized. Before then, while there were some spelling conventions, they varied widely from place to place or time to time. High rates of illiteracy among the lower and middle classes guaranteed that many of them did not know how to spell their names; so for official records they might pronounce their names to a scribe, who would spell them according to what he heard or to how he had been used to spelling similar names. Speakers of different dialects, of course, may well have pronounced the same name in different ways. If the peasant were German and the scribe Roman, the differences between the languages could be counted on to introduce further variability.

Over time, the sounds of French and German were invariably changing as well. Depending on when the spelling of a name within a particular branch of a family became stable (in that the members of that branch in succeeding generations endeavored to use the same spelling for their name that their forbears did), it could differ from the spelling used by other branches, which might have stabilized at a different point (e.g., after a particular sound change occurred). Although in such cases the spelling of a name could be said to follow its pronunciation, we also know that the pronunciation can follow the spelling, especially among immigrants who will often accede to the way natives pronounce a name based on its orthography (hence the North American pronunciation of the German name Bache to rhyme with the name of the letter “h”, or – as suggested above – the American pronunciation of Huck to rhyme with the word luck).

Because the languages themselves were so much in flux, because literacy rates were low, because spelling conventions were variable, what was essentially the same name could turn up in different places in wildly differing spellings. So the direct ancestors of a person living around 1700 who spelled his name Huck (and pronounced it like English hook), might have spelled (and pronounced) their name quite differently. In the remainder of this section, we’ll look just at varying spelling conventions in Latin, French, and German that in themselves would have virtually guaranteed that Huck would appear in variant spellings like Huc, Huk, Chuc, Chuk, Chuck in German and Huc, Hucq, Uc, Ucq, Houck in French.

First, some background on the languages themselves. The Germanic languages (to which both German and English belong) form a branch of a language family known as Indo-European, which also includes the Italic languages (Latin, French, Spanish, Italian), the Hellenic languages (Greek), and the Celtic languages (Welsh, Irish, Scots Gaelic), among others. These languages or the languages they developed from must have dispersed in Europe well before the earliest records we have of them, which only date from the third century AD in the case of Germanic and several centuries later in the case of English (though Greek is attested as early as 1400 BC). Archaeological evidence puts Indo-European culture in Europe before the end of the 4th millennium BC, though the Germanic branch had spread into the area of Germany east of Alsace (called Swabia, a name derived from the Seuvi who occupied the area) probably only in the middle of the first millennium BC. There is some controversy among linguists and archaeologists as to whether the languages spread along with or independently of migrations.

The earliest written records of the Old High German language, which was spoken in the high country of southwestern Germany between perhaps 500 AD and about 1050 AD and was the predecessor of Modern (High) German, were written in an alphabet we call “runes” or “futhark” (after its first six letters, th being written as a single letter). Also written in runes was the older Gothic language, which was related to Old High German and was spoken in Eastern Germany until about 600 AD. The runic alphabet (or alphabets – there were several) were based on the Latin and Greek alphabets, but also differed in some important respects from them. In regard to the letters most of interest to us (that is, those that figure in the history of the name Huck), the runic form for our letter “u” looked like an “n” and was pronounced like the long /ū/ in English boot or the short /ŭ/ in English hook. There was a single letter that looked like “c” that corresponded to our English “k” or what we call “hard c” in English. Runic also had a symbol that looked like our “x” which stood for a sound like a particularly breathy /k/ or the “ch” in the German name Bach [in linguistic terminology, a velar fricative]. Runic also had a letter that looked like Greek gamma (Γ) which had the phonetic value of our “hard g” as in gable. Within a century or two after 500 AD, the Latin alphabet of the Roman church had almost entirely replaced the runes used in Old High German.

The Latin alphabet was adopted from the Greek alphabet, with some variations. Latin turned the Greek gamma (Γ) into a “c”,which first was pronounced like “hard g” but in time came to be used for the /k/ sound after the letter “g” was itself introduced. Latin also turned the chi (x) of Greek, which the Greeks had used for what I’ve called “breathy /k/”, into the symbol for the sound /ks/ (as in English ax, pronounced as if it were spelled aks). Where Latin had a “breathy /k/”, the digraph “ch” was used.

When the Old High German-speaking church scribes starting writing their language in the Latin alphabet, they had to adapt it to the peculiarities of Germanic phonology, and in doing this they also drew on the runic tradition (though without explicit acknowledgement, since the runes were associated with religious practices then out of favor). Old High German had the “breathy /k/” sound, which was usually transcribed as “h”, as was the /h/ sound we usually associate with that letter. For the regular /k/ sound, they usually used the letter “c” before the letters “a”, “o”, and “u”, and “k” otherwise. When /k/ was long, it was written either as “kk” or as “ck”. Over time, and in part because of sound changes in the language, some confusion developed in the use of the letters “c”, “k”, and “h”. Eventually, the digraph “ch” was substituted for the “breathy /k/” sound, “ck” or “k” for the regular /k/ sound (short or long), and “c” for a sound that is close to an English /s/ but made with the tongue a little further back on the palate. For the /h/ sound, they continued to use “h”.

In France, the story is a little more straightforward. The Latin alphabet was in use for French throughout its evolution from Latin. French had and has no “breathy /k/” sound, and for the regular /k/ sound, it followed the Latin practice of using the letter “c” at the end of a word or anywhere else when followed by the letters “a”, “o”, or “u”. Before “e” or “i”, the letter “c” eventually began to be pronounced like our /s/, so to denote the /k/ sound in those environments, first “cq” or “q” and then “cqu” or “qu” might be substituted for “c”. Similarly, when the letter “g” appeared before “e” or “i” it was soft, as in English genial; otherwise it was hard, as in English guard. To represent a “hard g” before “i” or “e”, the convention was adopted of writing “gu”, where the “u” was not pronounced. For the long /ū/ sound, the digraph “ou” came to be used. The /h/ sound in Old French, as in Latin, was highly unstable and eventually disappeared, leading to some variability in spelling practice. In particular, a foreign word or name that began with the letter “h” might be translated into French without that letter, as Hadrian sometimes came out in French Adrien.

Sound changes

As indicated above, German and French were changing – radically in some ways – throughout the second millennium AD. These changes introduced variations in pronunciations that no doubt affected the spelling of the name that we today spell Huck, making it likely that it is related to Hug, Hugo, Huge, Hugi, Hucks, Hicks, Hück, Hucke, Hücke, Hugue, Hugues, Ug, Hauck, Hauk, Houk, and Houck.

During the Middle High Germanic period (1050-1350), a process called “umlauting” was transforming the back rounded vowels /u/ and /o/ into the front rounded vowels /ü/ and /ö/ when they occurred before the vowel /i/. (The sound /ü/ is pronounced like the vowel in the English word beet, except with the lips pursed and rounded; the sound /ö/ is pronounced like the vowel in the English word bait, though again with rounded and pursed lips).

Following this, unstressed vowels began to be significantly weakened or dropped altogether. So Old High German wola “well” became Middle High German wol and OHG aro “eagle” became MHG ar. This meant that a name like Hugi (where the /u/ was stressed and the /i/ was unstressed) might be pronounced first as if it were spelled Hügi and then as if it were spelled Hüg, while Hugo might become only Hug.

Moving toward the New High German period after 1350, in some dialects, /ū/ became /ou/ (as in English snow) and then eventually /au/ (as in English how) – so MHG hūs became Modern German Haus (pronounced like English house). Thus, what had originally been Hug or Huck might also have turned into Houck or Haug or Hauck (or Hauk).

In Modern (High) German, when a voiced consonant like /b/ or /d/ or /g/ comes at the end of a word, it is “devoiced” and pronounced like /p/, /t/, or /k/. Thus, the name Hug is pronounced in these dialects identically to Huck (which is to say, like English hook). This systematic devoicing began sometime during the later Middle High German period and the early Modern High German period, when commoners were acquiring surnames in considerable numbers.

French did not preserve a distinction between a “long /ū/”sound (as in English boot) and a “short /ŭ/” sound (as in English hook). It did preserve the Latin “long /ū/”, which (as indicated above) came to be spelled in French using the digraph “ou”. “Short /ŭ/” continued to be spelled with “u”, though its pronunciation changed. Instead of the sound in English hook, the letter “u” (except after “q” and “g”) was pronounced like /ü/.

As French was evolving in the middle ages, the case endings that had marked Latin for the most part were dropped. In the transition to modern French, unstressed vowels were also reduced, with the unstressed sound represented by written “e” virtually disappearing. One place that remnants of these endings can still be found is in proper names like Jacques, Hugues, Gilles, Charles, where the final “s” originally distinguished the masculine nominative case. Today, the final “s” and the preceding “e” are no longer pronounced (so Charles is pronounced as if it were spelled Sharl, and Hugues is pronounced /üg/).

Other possible sources of the name Huck

So far, we’ve been looking at how the modern name Huck might have evolved from the medieval Germanic Huguberht or Hugiberaht, but there are a few other possibilities that merit consideration (although I don’t think the evidence in their favor is quite as strong),

1. The Ancient Greek word huk, hukos evidently denoted a type of sea-fish. However, I don’t know of any corroborating evidence that would connect this to the Germanic variants of Huck found in Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy.

2. The Latin word huc meant roughly “to this place”. Again, I don’t know of anything that would tend to connect this to the Germanic name Huck. Just as Huck does not seem to be a Greek name, it is pretty clearly not Roman either.

3. More promisingly, in Gothic (spoken in eastern Germany until about 600 AD), the word hugs, hugsis apparently denoted a field or estate. The difficulty for one who wants to relate this word to Huck is that it does not seem to be found in the Old High German or Alsatian dialects spoken in western Germany where the Huck name predominates.

4. In Alsatian German, the verb hucken means “to sit”. This is related to Modern German hocken of the same meaning, and probably also to Hocke “sitting position, crouch; stook” and Hocker “stool”. In both Middle and Modern High German, Hucke is the word meaning “load”. There seems to have been a Germanic root huk, huuk, hukk which perhaps meant “to be bent” and gave rise to English hook, Old High German hako, hakko, hago, Modern German Haken, and Swiss German Haage “hook”. Also höcker, höcke, hügelig, the Modern German words for English hump and hilly, may be related.

5. There is of course also the Modern English word huck, meaning the hip or hipbone, but this is not found before the eighteenth century (though the variant huckbone occurs in the fifteenth century). The Modern German word for hip is Hüfte (Old High German huf) and therefore appears unrelated (or rather, is related to English hip, not Huck).

6. Huck is also a Modern English verb meaning “hawk; higgle in trading”. The related agentive nominal, huckster, is actually older than the verb huck, appearing as early as 1200 in the form hucssteress and by 1300 as hokester. The Modern German Höker “huckster, hawker” appears to have been formed after and on the model of the English word. (The English word hawk referring to the fowl = German Habicht is not related to Huck.)

7. The Modern English verb huck meaning “sail, float, heave or leap a considerable distance” – used contemporarily in the parlance of skiing and Frisbee – is apparently of recent invention. There was an Old High German past participle hucze “flown away, left, gone out”, though I have never seen anyone argue for a connection to the name Huck.

8. The Modern English word huckleberry is apparently an American corruption of the name hurtleberry or whortleberry. It doesn’t appear in print before the late seventeenth century in any case, and thus isn’t really a candidate as a source for the name Huck.

An argument in support of the hypothesis that Huck is related to Hug

Although some of the possibilities in the previous section (especially the third and fourth) might be worth pursuing as sources of the name Huck, I think there is some suggestive evidence that Huck and Hug are variant forms of the same name. If so, then a plausible case might be made that both are derived from the Germanic name element hugu.

Before going into this evidence, let me first summarize the argument against hugu as a source. The first prong of this argument is that although Huc appears as an element of a two-part name (Hucbertus) as early as the first part of the eight century, there isn’t any references to Huc or Huck standing alone until several centuries later, though there are references to Hugo already in the seventh century. The second prong of the argument focuses on the clustering of the Huck name around the Alsatian region, even though Hugues is widespread in France, Hugo in Germany, and Ugo in Italy. Why would Huck or Huc appear so much later than Hug or Hugo, and primarily around Alsace?

An important clue, I think, lies in the distribution of people named Huck and Hug in Alsace today. Alsace is divided into two regions, the northern Bas-Rhin and the southern Haut-Rhin, though historically the people of Alsace form a pretty homogenous whole. In Bas-Rhin, which includes Strasbourg, the number of telephone numbers assigned to individuals named either Huck or Hug as a percentage of the total population of the region is about .044%. In Haut-Rhin, which includes Mulhouse, it is about the same – 0.042%. However, in Bas-Rhin, 85% of these are Hucks and 15% are Hugs, while in Haut-Rhin, it’s almost the reverse – only 22% are Hucks and 78% are Hugs.

The fact that the percentage of people named Huck and Hug combined is almost identical in Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin (even though the percentages of people named Huck in the two regions are very different) would be a surprising coincidence if Huck and Hug were unrelated. For an example, consider two obviously unrelated names like Mathis and Ortlieb. Like the Huck/Hug pair, the Mathis/Ortlieb pair have different distributions in Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin – the Mathises predominate in both regions, but there are more of them relative to Ortliebs in Bas-Rhin than in Haut-Rhin. As a result, the two of them together account for about .043% of the phone assignments in Bas-Rhin but only .022% of the assignments in Haut-Rhin. This is as we’d expect, because there’s no “matching” of Mathises in the Bas-Rhin with Ortliebs in Haut-Rhin (and vice versa), as there was with the Hucks and the Hugs.

What might account for the balanced distribution of Hucks and Hugs in Alsace is the presence of what linguists call an isogloss – a geographical dividing line that separates different ways of pronouncing or spelling the same word. If we assume that north of the line people generally spelled their name Huck and south of the line they generally spelled the same name Hug, this kind of distribution would be expected. Indeed, if one goes further south into Switzerland, there are several towns with even higher concentrations of Hugs and lower concentrations of Hucks – in Winterthur, .076% of the telephone assignments are to these two names with 98% of them being Hugs, and in St. Gallen, .1% of the assignments are to the two names combined with, again, 98% of these being Hugs.

There could be any number of reasons for the existence of such an isogloss dividing Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin. For example, it’s possible that at the point the names in the two regions became stabilized the rule devoicing syllable-final /g/ had not spread southward beyond the Bas-Rhin. (Since this rule was a rule of German and not of Italian or French, it would of course not have affected the Italian name Ugo or the French name Hugues.) Or perhaps the spelling conventions in the two regions of Alsace differed at the time of stabilization, even if the names were pronounced identically.

One might confirm this hypothesis by finding other pairs of names like Huck/Hug that behaved similarly in Alsace. Although I’ve briefly looked, I haven’t located such a pair. There is one bit of suggestive evidence for the hypothesis, though. The Alsation historian André Ganter of the Centre départemental d'histoire des familles in Guebwiller in Haut-Rhin reports that in the seventeenth century a family named Hug moved from Soultz in the middle Haut-Rhin to Turckheim in northern Haut-Rhin, where they promptly changed the spelling of their name to Huck. While Mr. Ganter does not indicate the reason for this change, it seems reasonable to speculate that in Turckheim, people who shared that family’s surname spelled it with a “ck” rather than with a “g”.

If we accept the hypothesis that Huck and Hug were alternate spellings of the same name, then the following scenario suggests itself. At some point after the introduction of two-part names like Hugubald, Hucbert, and Huguberht in Germany (but in any event at least by 590 AD), the short-form or hypocoristic Hugo appeared. This short-form was in widespread use in Germany, France (with its variant Hugue) and Italy (with its variant Ugo) through the medieval period and after. The evidence is that the further shortening of the short-form to Huc or Hug was localized or predominate in the Alemannic region of northern Switzerland and Alsace. By the fourteenth century the spelling Huck had come to be preferred over Huc, while Hug continued to be used – though all three spellings presumably referred to the same name. At least by the seventeenth century an isogloss had been established bisecting Alsace into a northern region (Bas-Rhin) where the spelling Huck was preferred and a southern region (Haut-Rhin) where the spelling Hug was preferred.

While it is possible that there was a single individual named Huc or Hug or Huck in the Alemannic region who was the ancestral eponym from which all people today whose surname is Huck sprung, it doesn’t seem particularly likely. As we’ve seen, Hugo and its variants Hugue and Ugo were popular throughout Frankish Europe at the time that surnames based on ancestral eponyms were being adopted. Even if the hypocoristic Hug/Huc/Huck (as opposed to Hugo/Hugue/Ugo) originated or predominated in the Alemannic region, there probably would have been more than a few unrelated Hucberts or Hugoberhts who carried that particular sobriquet. Still, the especially high concentration of people surnamed Huck and Hug in Alsace and northern Switzerland today (a concentration that is much higher than that of, say, people surnamed Hugo in Berlin) suggests that their forebears either were relatively prolific breeders or had some special affinity for the names that isn’t to be found anywhere else.

Some Hucks (and Hugos and Hugoberts etc.) through the ages

1. According to the Annals of the Four Masters (composed 1632-36 AD), the 66th Monarch of Ireland was a gent named Ugaine Mór (or “Hugonius Magnus”, or “Hugony”), who was born in 140 BC, or died in 593 BC, or was a contemporary of Alexander the Great 356-323 BC, depending on the source. Whether or not the Irish name Ugaine can be etymologically related to Hugo or Huck, the Annals are generally considered to be fantasy.

2. Hugo (Hugue) of Austrasia (b. ca 590), Mayor of the Palace of Austrasia, had a grandson, Count Hugobert von Echternacht (640?-698), who was earl of Bavaria and Aquitaine. Hugobert’s grandson Hucbert apparently did nothing to distinguish himself in the eyes of historians except to die around 717.

3. A useful reference book from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, entitled

Les Noms de Personne sur le Territoire de L'Ancienne Gaule du VI au XII Siecle (1972), lists the following names of people culled from church and civil records (date, name, place of record):

693 Chugobercthus (Ch. Duvivier)

706 Chuchobertus (Liege)

722 Hucbertus (Duchesne)

726 Hucbertus (Alsace)

741 Hugileuba (St. Gallen)

763 Hug (St. Gallen)

775 Huguboldus (Gorze)

4. St. Hugbert became a Benedictine monk at age 12 at the abbey of Bretigny, near Noyon, France. He died circa 714.

5. St. Hucbertus (Chuchobertus, Chugobercthus) of Liege (656-727) was bishop of Maastricht. He was the grandson of Charibert, King of Toulouse and son of Bertrand, Duke of Aquitaine. He converted to Christianity after seeing a vision of the crucifix while hunting a stag on Good Friday. When his wife died soon after, he gave up his worldly possessions and became a priest.

6. St. Hugo von Rouen (died 730) was bishop of Rouen, Paris, and Bayeux, France. A nephew of Karl Martel and the son of Duke Drogo of Burgundy, he was named the bishop of Rouen in 722.

7. Hugbert, son of Theodobert, was ruler of Bavaria 725-737.

8. Hugue (Hugo) l’AbbJ (d. 844) was an illegitimate son of Charlemagne. A relative, Hugo, Duke of Els (855?-895), was son of Lothar II, King of Lotharingia

9. Hucbald (Hugbaldus, Ugbaldus, Uchubaldus) of St-Amand (840-932?) was a Benedictine monk who, while in the Diocese of Reims, made important contributions to the development of polyphony in medieval music.

10. Hugo I (895-956) was the father of Hugo Kapet (936-996), King of the France and patriarch of the Kapetinger line.

11. Hugue de Vermandois (1057-1102) was leader of the 1st crusade.

12. A person named Huc is listed with the date of 1083 in Mittelhochdeutsches Namenbuch nach oberrheinischen Quellen des Zwölften und dreizehnten Jahrhunderts, by Adolph Socin. The same book lists a Huc = Hugo de Gebenwilere with a date of 1135, as well as a Huch, Hůch, Hug with the date 1140 and a Huck with the date of 1298.

13. In 1185, the town of Hückeswagen was founded in Germany. A decade later, the village of Hugginges (from Hug + ingas = “family”) – now known as Huckings - was founded in England. The town of Hückelhoven was founded in Germany in the 13th century and was apparently named after one Reinhard von Huckelhoven. The town of Huck (also known as Splavnukha) was founded in Russia near the Volga River by German Evangelical Reform emigrants from Wachnebach in 1767. It’s named for its first mayor, Johannes Huck, a shoemaker.

14. A person named Huc is listed with the date of 1269 in Das grosse Buch der Familiennamen : Alter, Herkunft, Bedeutung : mit Unterstützung der Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache, edited by Horst Naumann.

15. A person named Conr. dictus Hûc of Neuffen is listed with the date 1269 in Etymologisches Wörterbuch by Josef Brechenmacher. The same book lists a Hûcks acker of Winterthur with the date 1303, an Eberh. Hug of Grosslingen with the date of 1308, a Bentz Hug of Stuttgart with the date 1350, a Hans Hug, who was a judge in Gmünd, with a date of 1390, and a Meister Huck, a citizen of Speyer, with the date of 1475.

16. A person named Borchard Huch of Greifswald is listed with the date of 1373 in Niederdeutsches Namenbuch, by Hans Bülow.

17. On July 30, 1565, Adolphe Huck, a gardener, was married to Madelein Syfrid in Strasbourg. Adolphe’s father was named Galle Huck. Adolphe’s son and grandson were also gardeners named Adolphe. Beginning in the mid-1500s, several generations of Hucks followed Nicolas Huck and AndrJ Huck as gardeners of the poêle des jardiniers of the Faubourg National in Strasbourg.

18. In 1589, Hans Hug was made commandant of the constabulary in Schlierbach. His son Johan Ulrich Hug became the registrar-in-chief of Landser lordship. Another son, Christoffel Hug became the mayor of Magstatt, where he built a house in 1621.

19. In 1554, FrJdJric Huck was listed as a blacksmith in RibeauvillJ in northern Bas-Rhin. In 1598, his brother Pierre Huck was listed as owner of a house with wine-press and wine-cellar, on which he was taxed 2 florins.

20. On September 22, 1639, Wolff Huck of Wangen in Bas-Rhin married the widow Anne Wintz of Strasbourg. According to the historian and genealogist Jean-Louis Kleindienst, one of their descendants was Alfred Kastler, the Nobel laureate in physics.

21. In the mid-seventeenth century, there were several distinguished glassmakers in northern Switzerland in the vicinity of Solothurn named Hug. In 1656, for example, the abbey of Lucelle contracted with Urs and Hans Jost Hug to provide the glass for Saint Pierre.

22. On Jun 26, 1764, Jean Georges Huck purchased a house with a wine press and gardens in Hunawihr near RibeauvillJ in northern Haut-Rhin and established himself as a vintner. Numerous generations of Hucks followed him into the profession of viticulture, and indeed grape-growing and wine-making have constituted one of the most popular occupations of the Hucks of Alsace. According to an article in l’Alsace, today 28 different families in Alsace claim Jean Georges as a direct ancestor.

23. On July 12, 1780, Captain Christian Huck, a lawyer from Philadelphia who had enlisted in the British Army, led his soldiers into a massacre at the hands of an American revolutionary militia in South Carolina. The battle, which is known as the Battle of Huck’s Defeat, was a turning point in the Revolutionary War. The captain was killed, and only 12 of his troops survived.

24. On September 29, 1829, Carl Friedrich Otto Huck is listed as being a jurist at the University of Koenigsburg (now Kalingrad, in Russia).

25. On October 7, 1870, Sébastien Huck died. A gunsmith, he had been mayor of Gresswiller and bailiff to the Baron De Wangen. His daughter Marie Barbe was a nun and his son Antoine was a priest in French Africa.

26. ThJophile Huck (1857-1927), born at Gresheim near Darmstadt, was a vicar in Strasbourg and a curate in Bischeim. In 1920 he published in German a history of the Alsatian village of Ehl near Strasbourg and the pilgrimage of St. Materne (translated into English in 1990 by Pierre Paul Huck).

27. In 1892, Albert Huck published a synopsis of the first three gospels of the New Testament. In subsequent editions, it became a standard reference for scholars.

28. John Philip Huck (1922-1987) was the consort of the actress Beatrice Lillie (1894-1987). He died the day after she did and is buried next to her.

29. Art Huck is the name given to a shady character who runs an auto repair shop in The Big Sleep, the 1946 movie starring Humphrey Bogart.

30. In 1961, Charlotte S. Huck, along with her coauthor Doris A. Young, published the first edition of the widely used textbook, Children’s Literature in the Elementary School. A seventh edition was published in 2001.

30. In 2000, John Lloyd Huck endowed the John Lloyd Huck Institute for Management Science Research at Royal Holloway University of London and the University of Reading in England. He is chairman emeritus of Merck & Company, Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company, and Nova Pharmaceuticals, and is also board president emeritus of Pennsylvania State University.