What's In A Name?

There's been a long interest in my part into the full meaning of my name, and also in those of other people. This sort of thing came up in an episode of Stargate a few years ago, episode [403]. The exchange went as follows:

Anise: You may call me Anise.
Dr. Jackson: Anise?
Anise: It means "Noble Strength".
Dr. Jackson: I'm Daniel. It means, uh, "God is my judge".
Col. O'Neill: I'm Jack. It means... What's in the box?

I didn't want to be like Jack O'Neill and be clueless as to what my name means. Of course I did the research, and I've also always been intrigued when I hear foreign sounding names, and I can guess where they are from, but sometimes it can be really hard to figure out what they mean. Just look at the English names Robert and Kevin. If you didn't know the history, you might never guess. I think Pilar is the only English-uncommon name I've successfully deduced.

Anyway, more along the lines of surnames, I started thinking recently again about the whole "Who was the first person who just randomly made up a last name?" instead of having it be a lineage name (like Michaelson) or related to a family career (Miller), or a locus (Van Vessem), or even in some cases, a seemingly random word is picked, but there is probably some esoteric association. My own surname happens to be the same as a word for a certain type of animal, but I don't know how it got associated with that side of the family. My mother's maiden name is an archaism in another language for the word "monk" (and also similar to that word in a different language). Again, who knows how that caught on? And as near as I can tell, my maternal grandmother's maiden name might be related to a toponym, but I have no way of knowing what came first, or even whence came that name. My last name has 4.6 million results on google, and is the name of at least a dozen notable people. My mother's last name has 1,460 results, and I can recognize immediate relatives somewhat quickly. Her mother's name yields no results for most spellings, but 2,970 for a sepcific variation, but 7,640 if done with the non-latin characters. Most seem to be about the place, however, it's quite possible that's just where it goes back to.