My mother likes to talk about how names were a sudden thing for a lot of European peasantry. Like suddenly a few hundred years back literally everyone was told to register a last name. In some places you had to pay to get pretty ones (I'm most familiar with Jewish names but an example would be any name with "Pearl" in it or "Shapiro", which is a sapphire), and a lot of people just went with nicknames ("Sorkin" means "Sarah's child" the same way Johnson means "son of John". Then there were people that the whole village called "The Redhead" or "the lame") or occupations (Baker, Smith, etc).

If you were suddenly forced to choose a new family name, what would it be? Mine would be "Shwartzenkatz" because it sounds better in Yiddish than the English "Black Cat". My family attracts black cats for some reason.