Moses Family History

Jewish, Welsh, African American, and African (mainly Nigeria): from the Biblical personal name borne by the Israelite leader who led the Israelites out of Egypt as related in the Book of Exodus. The Hebrew form of the name is Moshe. It is probably of Egyptian origin from a short form of an ancient Egyptian personal name such as Rameses or Tutmosis, meaning ‘conceived (by a god)’. However, very early in its history the name acquired a folk etymology being taken as a derivative of the Hebrew root verb mshh ‘extract or draw (something), e.g., from water’ and was associated with a story of the infant Moses being discovered among the bullrushes by Pharaoh's daughter (Exodus 1-10).

As a Welsh surname, it was adopted among Dissenter families in the 18th and 19th centuries. In North America, this surname has absorbed cognates from other languages, for example, Italian Moise, Hungarian Mózes (see Mozes), Assyrian/Chaldean Moshe, and Arabic Musa. English: variant of Moss with post-medieval excrescent -s.

English: variant of Moyses, a Cornish personal name derived from Middle English Moises, a vernacular form of Moses (see 1 above).