Ungerer

Recorded in a number of spellings including: Ungerecht, the patronymic Ungerechts, and the residential Ungerer, this is a German medieval surname. Strictly speaking it is Hungarian, or at least it refers to a person who came from Hungary, and presumably settled in Germany, although in the spelling of Ungerer it does literally describe a person 'of Hungary'. However locational surnames are usually 'from' names. That is to say that they were names given to people after they left, in this case their former country, and moved elsewhere. In the normal courseof events 'elsewhere' would probably refer to the next village or town, although even those places may well have seemed to the unaccustomed traveller to be on another planet seven hundred years ago. Laws even between adjoining towns may have been quite different, dialects or accents almost certainly so, and strangers rarely welcome. To move to another country would have been to embrace entirely different standards, and no doubt to be called 'Hungarian' in Germany or for instance 'Scott' in England, was most probably a double edged sword. Nethertheless this is one of the very earliest surnames to be recorded in the German listing. Berchtand Ungereht of Biberach appearing in the charters of that place in the year 1279, whilst Ulrich Ungerer is recorded in the charters of Morzheim in Landau, shortly afterwards in the year 1301.