John Bannister Goodenough, the American co-inventor of Lithium-ion batteries and a co-winner of 2019 Nobel prize for Chemistry, has passed away. He was just a month short of turning 101. Goodenough also played a significant role in the development of Random Access Memory (RAM) for computers.
Considering how surnames originate, that would be interesting finding out just what the ancestor who first used that name did in order to be known by it.
“You’re looking for Jack? There’s Jack the baker, Jack the tailor, and there’s Jack from down the street. He doesn’t really do anything, but he’s good enough.”
Possibly a product of immigration. I know a guy from the US whose surname is “Supernaw”. He told me that the original surname might have been a French one, something like “Surprenant”, which the English-speaking immigration officials wrote down as “Supernaw”. You can imagine how the conversation went right?
Something similar might have happened here, maybe an Eastern European surname like (completely made up example) “Godenov” got written down by English officials as “Goodenough”.