Evan Hrbek

My name is a very interesting one. Unlike many names, my name only has one vowel out

of the five letters that are consisted in it. This misleads many people from pronouncing my name

correctly, even though it is actually very simple to pronounce. When people pronounce my name

incorrectly, I tend to get frustrated because I feel that it is not difficult, and it spelt very similar to

the way it sounds, which is “Her-beck.” But on the other hand, I sometimes can understand why

it is pronounced incorrectly so many times because my name consists of three consonants back

to back before the next vowel. Since this happens very often, it makes me wonder where my

name came from or why my name was spelt the way it was.

I thought that it was pretty obvious that my last name was not an “American” name, or a

name that originated in the United States. This made me even more intrigued about my family

name because it was not like any ordinary name I have ever heard. I asked my parents why our

name was pronounced incorrectly, and my mother informed me that it has something to do with

my father’s family history. My family is basically split in half when nationalities are explained.

My mother’s side of the family is mainly Italian, which explains why she was given the last

name, “pelliccio”. My father’s side of the family is mainly Czech, so that gave me some clues. I

did not want to ask my father because I felt like that would give away the meaning behind my

name, and I wanted to find this out all by myself. I conducted some research on my family name

and it turns out that my name is European. After looking even deeper, I found out that my name

actually originated from what is now known as the Czech Republic. It turns out that my name

actually is a nickname for a hunchback, which confused me. This made me question what that

even meant, or if there was an even deeper meaning to that in the Czech Republic. This

information blew my mind because this made me realize that there is so much more I probably
don’t even know about my family name. I asked my father about his parent’s and where they

were from. Apparently, they were both born in the Czech Republic, which explains a lot.

As you can see, there is a lot to uncover about my family history, starting with the name I

was given when I was born. I discovered a lot of new information about my father’s side of the

family such as where most of them were born and what they did with their lives. Best of all, I

learned about what my name actually meant. In the future, I plan to go even further through

ancestry to find out when my name was actually created.