Re: MOSIER

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Dear Deborah:
Welcome! I'm glad you've taken a look around JewishGen.org. Have you registered your interest with the JewishGen Family Finder? http://www.jewishgen.org/JGFF will let others know of your interests, and will allow you to contact others who have listed a particular surname.

Questions like yours actually come up a lot here. With no disrespect intended: Surnames aren't Jewish. People are Jewish. There are very, very few surnames that have been held *only* by Jews, and the reasons for this are many and varied.

Can you tell us a little about your great-grandmother? Where did she come from? Where did she live? Have you found other MOSIERs in that vicinity?

The surname MOSIER may look like "Moses", but it also looks like the German surname MOSER, which is very common. Check out an on-line German phone book--you'll find thousands. That doesn't mean that there are no Jewish MOSERs, nor does it rule out that *they* adopted the surname because it sounded like "Moses."

According to Lars Menk's _A Dictionary of German-Jewish Surnames_, there were several Jewish MOSER families in Germany in the 19thC, but none named MOSIER. But that's only Germany. Alexander Beider has published several volumes on Jewish surnames from Eastern Europe; you might check those.

Trying a few other on-line phone directories could give you an idea of where MOSIERs live today, and that could give you a clue as to where to look next.

Good luck, and let us know what you find!

Roger Lustig
Princeton, NJ USA
research co-ordinator, GerSIG

Deborah Ruth Hikari Trotter wrote:

All I came onto the site to do was to find out if my great-grandmother's maiden name was of Jewish origins and how it came about and all I can find is lists of people who've lived with variants of the family name. Does this mean that the name Mosier is actually Jewish (sounds and looks like it could come from Moses/Moishe) or is it just that there have been some people on the list happen to have similar sounding names to that?
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Sender: Roger Lustig <GerSIG.Research@xxxxxxxxxxx>
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