My wife asked me why the surname Patel was so common; of course I hit Wikipedia, which told me:
Patel is an Indian surname or title, predominantly found in the state of Gujarat, representing the community of land-owning farmers and later (with the British East India Company) businessmen, agriculturalists and merchants. Traditionally the title is a status name referring to the village chieftains during medieval times, and was later retained as successive generations stemmed out into communities of landowners. Circa 2015 there are roughly 500,000 Patels outside India, including about 150,000 in the United Kingdom and about 150,000 in the United States. As of the 2000 U.S. Census, nearly 1 in 10 people of Indian origin in the US is a Patel.
The etymology is interesting: “The Gujarati term paṭel, along with its cognate Marathi terms pāṭel and pāṭīl, are derived from the Prakrit word paṭṭaïl(l)a- ‘village headman’, itself derived from the Sanskrit word paṭṭakila ‘tenant of royal land’, a term first appearing in the Vetālapañcaviṃśatikā.” But I confess what made me unable to resist posting it was the final sentence of the article:
With those who immigrated to Germany during British colonial rule in India, Gujaratis used the variation “Pätel”, with an umlaut, to better integrate with German society.
“Pätel” is obviously the plural form.
(This One Weird Trick wouldn’t work for me. I think I have previously mentioned a German hotel proprietor I once encounterd in Athens who insisted that I must really be Polish, because only Poles have names ending in “w.” It’s a fair cop …)
Clearly an anglicized version of Ediszów.
Sadly, the source is one of those low-quality sites with a page for each surname, and that site’s source is just user input from someone called vp701. Also, it claims there are only about 22 people in the world named Pätel.
Sigh. I knew it was too good to be true…
forebears.io is itself not a bad source. They have their main reference sources laid out on the credits page.
The information about the name is specifically called out as being user-submitted.
The count of 22 is for the name Pätel. The name Patel numbers 4,847,640.
Patel has an entry in Hobson-Jobson (“Patel, Potail”), and one in the OED as a regular word.
Pätel and Paetel appear to be German surnames not, or at least not necessarily, of Gujarati origin; there are XING profiles of Pätels and Paetels with pictures that don’t look Gujarati. But probably others here would know more.
A Michael Pätel in Germany collected over 2000 editions of The Little Prince, but an even bigger collector boasts of having acquired his collection, which makes me wonder if he’s dead by now.
German Wikipedia records five Paetels, all apparently from a single Berlin family, and all spelled as such, never as Pätel.
I’m not sure if existence of this (clearly not common) name lends more or less credibility to the ‘Gujaratis used the variation “Pätel”, with an umlaut, to better integrate with German society’ story.
Cf. Hebraized Fattal, earlier here.
Familysearch shows lots of Pâtel / Patels in old church records in Northern France, and Paetels in Brandenburg and Ostpreußen. All the way at least into the 1600s and 1700s, resp.
Ah, so the extra e is the Early Modern Dutch length marker.
Familysearch shows lots of Pâtel
There are also numerous “Pastels” in South-Eastern France, a name that goes back to at least the 15th century.