Gomes

In Portuguese the ending -es means son of, and it built most of the country's oldest surnames: Henriques, Pires, Rodrigues, Lopes, Nunes, Mendes, Fernandes, Esteves. Gomes belongs to that set. It is the son of a man called Gome or Gomes, a personal name carried into Iberia, probably from a Gothic root meaning man, and it is old enough to be shared with the Old Galician naming stock as well as with the Castilian form Gómez.

Several of these patronymics outlived the given names that made them. Nobody in Portugal is christened Lopo, Mendo or Soeiro now, yet Lopes, Mendes and Soares are everywhere, and Gome went the same way. The name shows in the northern nobility long before surnames were hereditary: Egas Gomes de Sousa, born in 1035, was lord of the house of Felgueiras and Sousa, and there the word is still working as a description of whose son he was rather than as a family name.

When the Portuguese record starts naming men who sailed for a living, the surname is already in it three times inside a single century. Diogo Gomes (c. 1420–1500) is set down as a navigator and explorer. Fernão Gomes appears in the fifteenth century as an explorer and merchant, the two trades that in Portugal were rarely separable. Estêvão Gomes (c. 1483–1538) is recorded likewise as an explorer.

Nothing in the record joins them. A patronymic says only whose son a man was, so three men of one name in one century are three families rather than one branch, unless a document says otherwise, and for these three none does.

Mateus Gomes de Aguiar was born in 1628. At twenty he sailed for Bahia in Brazil under the orders of the 2nd Count of Castelo Melhor, Governor of Brazil from 1650 to 1654, and arrived into the long Dutch-Portuguese War being fought over the sugar coast. In 1651 he made his name in a naval action against the Dutch.

The reward came two years later. At the Count of Castelo Melhor's urging he was raised to the nobility in 1653, and he was a Knight of the Order of Santiago. That single decision is the reason a Gomes line can be traced in Portuguese records at all rather than dissolving into the general run of the name: ennoblement meant papers, arms, and heirs whose marriages were written down.

His eldest son, João Baptista de Aguiar e Azevedo, married three times, each time to an heiress of a different family, and had sons by all three. Portuguese practice let those sons take their mothers' surnames and arms in order to inherit their mothers' estates, and they did. In 1686 Aguiar e Azevedo married D. Maria de Proença de Azevedo Pacheco de Sacadura Botte, sister and heiress of the 8th Lord of Alameda; when the other branches failed in the male line, hers was the only one left standing, and the name Gomes de Aguiar simply fell out of use.

The line itself did not. Mateus Gomes de Aguiar's descendants served Portugal for more than four centuries across four continents: a grandson, José Pereira de Vasconcelos, Captain-at-Sea, served and died in the Portuguese State of India, and a great-grandson, Dom José de Macedo Sottomayor e Castro, Captain of Dragoons, served and died in São Paulo. Their seats are still standing. The sixteenth-century Quinta de São Simão da Aguieira held the family for the better part of three centuries, the Quinta da Bica in the Seia region is a listed building still in the family's hands, and the palace in Coimbra was lived in until 1972, when it passed to the university.

A reader who finds Gomes in their own papers should know that the name left Portugal by more than one road, and they are not the same road. One is ordinary European migration: Portuguese families moving into France, Britain and the rest of the continent and carrying the name with them, as with Arthur Gomes, born in Portugal in 1969 and a rugby union player in France.

The other road runs through the empire, and it did not carry descent with it. Portuguese sources are plain that it was common practice to name freed slaves after their former owners, so that every descendant then bore that owner's surname, and that indigenous people who were not enslaved took their godparents' surnames as their own. Sharing the spelling is not, on its own, evidence of a Portuguese ancestor.

In letters the name arrives late and arrives twice. António Gomes Leal (1848–1921) worked as a poet, and Soeiro Pereira Gomes (1909–1949) as a writer in the generation after; his given name, Soeiro, is one of those archaic Portuguese names that survives elsewhere only fossilised inside a surname.

It remains a working Portuguese name rather than a historical one. Miguel Gomes, born 1972, is a film director; another Miguel Gomes, born the same year, competed as a fencer. André Gomes (born 1993) and Nádia Gomes (born 1996) play football, Pedro Gomes (born 1983) is a triathlete, and Érica Gomes (born 1994) is a Paralympic athlete. None of them are related to the others in any way the records show, which is the point of a patronymic: the name says only that somebody, a long way back, was the son of a man called Gome.