Prussian Name Generator

A Prussian name usually means one of two things. For most people it is the Kingdom of Prussia of 1701 to 1918: Junker landowners with a von before a short, hard surname (Kleist, Bülow, Zieten, Puttkamer, Dönhoff), given names that ran in families for generations (Friedrich, Wilhelm, Heinrich, Joachim, Luise, Charlotte, Wilhelmine), and the officer-class habit of double names like Friedrich Wilhelm and Hans Joachim. The eastern provinces add something no other German region has: Masurian surnames of Polish origin such as Sadowski and Kulessa, Prussian-Lithuanian names like Kairies, Naujoks and Szameitat, and Pomeranian names ending in -ow and -in (Treptow, Polzin, Zastrow) that come from old Slavic place names.

The second meaning is the Old Prussians, the Baltic people the Teutonic Order conquered in the 13th century. Their names survive only in chronicles and land grants: Herkus Monte, Glande, Diwan, Skomand, Auktume. They sound closer to Lithuanian than German, and are usually recorded with a tribal homeland attached (of Sambia, of Natangia, of Pogesania).

This generator covers both, plus the French Huguenot families (Fontane, Ancillon, du Bois-Reymond) that made up a fifth of Berlin by 1700. Use the noble names for officers and estate owners, the commoner names for soldiers, farmers and Königsberg townsfolk, and the Baltic names for anything set before 1300.