My Cuffy Family Roots

I did do a little research about the Cuffy's... don't get to excited, this won't help anyone get any closer to finding any ancestors. At least its interesting, though.

So in Ghana, people name their children after the days of the week that they are born on. They also give the children real names(like Irene, Ty or Tamu), but the "friday = kofi = cuffy" thing will be added on as sort of an equivalent to the american middle name. Only the day-of-the-week name comes first. Our name is Cuffy... or Kofi(that's how they spell it here) and that just means that our grandfather was born on a Friday.

Think Kofi Annan(former U.N. secretary general). His name is not actually Kofi, nor is it his surname placed first, like they do in Japan(think "Schwoeffermann Tamu")... its just there because Friday was the day he was born on.

When Cuffy slaves switched over to the British naming system, they must have forgotten the old ways and confused Kofi for a surname. Perhaps because their slave masters decided it was too difficult to pernounce forefather Cuffy's actual name. But, since its just the name that children born on a Friday are given... one out of every 14 Ghanians has that name(one out of seven for the days of the week and double that because girls get a different -but related- name then boys).

A big part of being a member of the black community is having no idea where you came from. Blacks know where their parents and maybe grandparents were from but after a couple more generations farther than that the trail just leads to a slave ship that could have sailed from anywhere.

I have a cousin on my moms side who is searching for the roots of that side of the family. But it is really hard because no slave families where kept together and the masters often changed the names of their slaves to things that were easier to pronounce.

So, that leaves us here. We just learned that mom's family gets their last name from a day of the week. I think its similar to americans' astrological signs "Hi i'm Tamu, I'm a Taurus". Most people don't care what your astrological sign is... but we all still konw which one is ours and will occassionally read about it in the newspaper. Ghana's day-of-birth name is similar. There is a meaning to the day someone is born on, but, at least among the people I spoke to, no one seams to know what the meaning is... its just something thats done because of tradition.

So when my ancester come from africa they went by that useless name because they thought it was his surname and our whole family has been calling themselves by a family name that doesn't really exist.


peace - i'm gettin' tired from droppin' all hese bricks of truth
but no really, if you want to find out where we came from... get a genetics test. they work. really well.