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Kevin Losereit © 2007
This page last updated:
29 May 2007
Home » Losereit Surname Project
While doing genealogy research on my Losereit ancestors from the northern parishes of East Prussia I came across records of many other Losereits in surviving records of the past. I have no information proving or disproving that I'm related to all of these other Losereits, however it appears that the name Losereit has it's origins in this area of East Prussia. The purpose of this web site is to share and exchange research findings with others that are also looking for their Losereit ancestors. Perhaps in the future we may put this puzzle together and discover that there is a genealogical relationship amongst all of us of Losereit descent.
My research has found the over the past 200 years the surname Losereit has had some spelling variations. In the past people were not as literate as they are today, and typically the church pastor was one of the most literate people in the community. Names and words were spelt the way they sounded. The various dialects of the times would have resulted in a slight variation in how names were written. I have found the following variations of the name Losereit. As you can see, they all sound very similar:
LOZOREITIS, LOZOREITE, LOZURATIS, LOZUREIT, LOZERAITIS, LOZERAITE, LOSERAT, LOZERETS, LOZOREIT, LOZEREIT, and LOSEREIT.
The geographical origin of the surname Losereit appears to originate from an area in East Prussia commonly referred to as Prussian-Lithuania. Prussian-Lithuania was the name given to the northern part of East Prussia in view of its predominantly Lithuanian-speaking population. In the earlier spellings of the name, the surname suffixes AITIS, and AITE are typically found. AITIS and AITE are Lithuanian surname suffixes where AITIS signifies "son of" while AITE signifies an unmarried female. Over time as more German was being spoken in Prussian-Lithuania, Lithuanian place names and family names began to evolve to sound more German. This Germanization resulted in the AITIS and AITE surname suffixes evolving to EITIS and EITE and further to become EIT. As the Germanization continued, place names and family names that contained the "Z" sound evolved to containing the "S" sound. Here is an example of how the surname evolved through the generations to it's current spelling:
LOZORAITIS > LOZOREITIS > LOZOREIT > LOSEREIT
