Surname:Scherno

Scherno is not a common surname so I hoped it would be easy to trace my Scherno line. It hasn't been easy so I have decided to collect all I find in a one-name-study here on WeRelate.

Most people with the name which I have researched to date, either lived or live in the Alsace region of France, with almost every Scherno surname reference of either living or deceased being able to be traced to Dabo or the surrounding region.

Surname Origins

Where or what are the origins of the Scherno name seem completely unknown. I remember something that my grandparents said which I have not been able to locate again that the Scherno name may have initially come into Alsace from nearby Switzerland and the spelling was different. This is possibly corroborated by the fact that some of the few Scherno's I have found a reference to who did not originally come from Alsace, were from Switzerland and throughout history Alsace is known to have attracted immigrants from Switzerland.

Scherno is also an Italian noun which means to scorn, sneer or jeer. To ridicule the subject (person or thing) in a contemptuous and offensive manner.

Research

As of 20 November 2014

• There are only 96 listings for people with the exact spelling, Scherno amongst the records on FamilySearch. These include multiple listings for some people.

• Ancestry.com indicates that it has 227 Scherno records. 111 are family trees with the same few people duplicated many times. The remaining records include birth, marriage and death, military, immigration and census records.

A thorough comparison makes it clear that many of the census, immigration and military records are the same on FamilySearch and Ancestry with only a few records found on just one site. Prior to entering the data it appears that the available records on these 2 sites represent approximately 80 people with the Scherno surname.

• There are 184 results on Geneanet, including 166 family tree listings, many of which are multiple entries for individual family trees. Excluding my own tree, this results in only 83 family trees and in the non-wiki environment many of the family trees have the same people and information in them.

• I have also been looking through the documents available for births, deaths and marriages in Dabo, France, where many of the people listed in the Geneanet family trees are from. There are not a lot of Scherno listings in these books and of course many of them are listed at least twice for both their birth and death. So far I have extracted information from the summary tables for the years 1720 - 1903 and there are 124 Scherno listings.

• Near Dabo is Engenthal, Bas-Rhin, France which Google maps shows 3 different walking options between the two towns as being 6.7, 6.9 and 7.1 kilometers. Engenthal also has records freely available and based on information in the Geneanet family trees, many Alsace-Lorraine Scherno's come from Engenthal.

Nov 2017 Update

I have looked a lot at the Alsace-Lorraine Scherno families and found that I can trace all current Scherno's living in Dabo, Engenthal and the surrounding region as having originated from common ancestors. The family of Jacobi Scherno and Veronique Scheiber.