The Philippines Was Issued Its Surnames Out of a Catalogue in 1849

On 21 November 1849 the Spanish governor-general of the Philippines signed a decree, and a colony received its surnames out of a printed book.

The problem he was solving

Spain had governed the Philippines for close to three centuries by that point, and its administrators could not keep track of anybody. Generations of evangelisation had left most Filipinos carrying names drawn from a small stock of Catholic saints. Whole towns were full of people called some arrangement of de los Santos, de la Cruz and de los Reyes, with no consistent family name underneath to separate one household from the next.

For a colonial government trying to run a tax register and a census, that is close to unworkable. You cannot bill a family you cannot distinguish from four hundred others in the same parish.

The catalogue

Governor-General Narciso Clavería y Zaldúa had a book compiled, the Catálogo alfabético de apellidos, holding roughly 61,000 surnames. Spanish family names went in. So did words drawn from Tagalog and other local languages, along with plants, minerals, geography and assorted vocabulary that had never been anybody's name before.

The book was then distributed to towns, and the allocation ran alphabetically. A given town's families were assigned names from one stretch of the alphabet. The next town got the next stretch. Officials worked down the list and across the archipelago, handing out surnames the way you would issue supplies.

Families who already held an established surname were generally allowed to keep it. Everybody else got what the catalogue gave them.

The evidence is still in the phone book

Because the allocation was geographic rather than genealogical, the first letter of a Filipino surname still carries a trace of where the family was living in 1849. Iloilo province is the textbook case. Surnames beginning with A cluster in Alimodian, surnames beginning with M cluster in Miagao, and the pattern holds well enough that a name can point at a municipality. It is a strange thing to find sitting inside a modern population register.

It also explains something that puzzles people about Filipino names. Enormous numbers of Filipinos carry surnames that would pass without comment in Madrid, and have no Spanish ancestry at all. The name was assigned by a clerk with a catalogue and a quota. It records an administrative event rather than a bloodline.

What the decree was for

It is worth being clear about the purpose. This was not an attempt to give people a heritage. Clavería's stated concern was the collection of tribute and the functioning of the civil registry, and the reform worked because it made the population legible to the state.

Legibility is what most surname mandates are for. Turkey ordered its citizens to invent surnames in 1934 for census and inheritance reasons. Japan made them compulsory in 1875 while building a modern administrative state. Governments start caring intensely about family names at the point where they need to tax, conscript or count people, and not much before.

An unusual way to get a name

Most of the world's surnames accumulated. They came from a trade, a father, a village, a nickname that stuck, built up over generations by neighbours who needed a way to tell two men called Juan apart.

The Philippines received most of its surnames in one delivery, from a book, in alphabetical order. There are few clearer demonstrations that a surname is a piece of administrative equipment before it is anything else.