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The pastor Surname

pastor Name Meaning and History

  1. English, Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan, and French: occupational name for a shepherd, Anglo-Norman French pastre (oblique case pastour), Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan, pastor ‘shepherd’, from Latin pastor, an agent derivative of pascere ‘to graze’. The religious sense of a spiritual leader was rare in the Middle Ages, and insofar as it occurs at all it seems always to be a conscious metaphor; it is unlikely, therefore, that this sense lies behind any examples of the surname.
  2. German and Dutch: humanistic name, a Latinized form of various vernacular names meaning ‘shepherd’, for example Hirt or Schäfer (see Schafer).
  3. Americanized spelling of Hungarian Pásztor, an occupational name from pásztor ‘shepherd’.

Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508137-4
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pastor Family Facts

Distribution of pastor Families in the US in 1920
Number of pastor families
 41-80
 14-40		 1-13
 0
Compiled by Ancestry.co.uk from the 1920 US Federal Census records

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Year

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The information for this map came from Ancestry.co.uk’s US Federal Census Collection.
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