Do you know anything about Portugal?

Do you know anything about the surname Deatker? Where is it from?

• i'm from india and i really want to find out about my great grandmother and great grandfather.. i know their full names.. Stanely Ernest Deatker and Jamuna Deatker.. although i'm not sure if they were legally married. my great grandfather was an officer in the british army in india around 1930.. i did a genealogy search on theoriginalrecord.com and it came up with a list of officers in the britsh army in 1934.. which i already knew so i havent found any new info.. if you know anything about the surname deatker plz share.. i would especially like to know which country of origin its from.. e.g. britain, portugal, france, etc thank you :)

• Answer:

  NOTHING can ever be assumed by a surname, for a number of reasons. For starters..I often work a name from www.familysearch.org, for the reason that they normally include data from original sources like church registers. I would have assumed (1) he is in the British army, he must be British and (2) the first names seem Anglo, not Indian. My own 'rule' to not assume would have bit me. Familysearch only had 3 entries, and each of those are IN India, one is in the late 1700s. Both of the males are Ecclesiastical returns in Bengal. Now.. what surprises me is to not find ANY MENTION of the name elsewhere, ie England, etc. It also isn't in rootsweb.com or the social security death index. offhand.. the possible answer is that your spelling may not BE anywhere, except India. And yes, this does occur.. if a person named Jones moves from one locality to another, a clerk enters the name as Jines ..lo and behold..from that time on, the person uses the name Jines. It did not exist until the clerk entered it as such. This is common in genealogy.. but computers match to exact, and thus, can miss a spelling variation. SOME sites (primary genealogy) know this, and program to find the alternate spellings. the other point is that many names won't come from one original place anyway.. ie it can appear in numerous countries, and looking by surname is a waste of time. You would need to find records concerning the specific PERSON to define his/her origin. Jamuna.. I am going to suspect that her name was not Deatker by birth. You need her family name to trace her. So.. my normal sources did little to help you. At least you do know of a location (Bengal) and record.. you might try to find records there which are not guaranteed to be online, but might offer insight that the person was actually from London, etc. The only other place I know to look is ancestry.com (UK version? world version?) which I do not have access to. edit I googled Frederick Deatker..surprise, I do find more info.. possible connections to Brisbane, Australia. All my assumptions are landing flat tonite. edit 2 not a variation...' http://www.archive.org/stream/indianmissionary00badliala/indianmissionary00badliala_djvu.txt this link is a full text book with details... you have a missionary line... it should include from where in this book. another book http://www.archive.org/stream/memoirshickey03hickuoft/memoirshickey03hickuoft_djvu.txt