Coat of Arms & Family Crests Store
  Granito Coat of Arms / Granito Family CrestThis Italian surname of GRANITO was an occupational name for the keeper of a granary. The name was rendered in medieval documents in the Latin form GRANETARIUS. The name is also spelt GRANITA and GRANIT. Many of the modern family names throughout Europe reflect the profession or occupation of their forbears in the Middle Ages and derive from the position held by their ancestors in the village, noble household or religious community in which they lived and worked. The addition of their profession to their birth name made it easier to identify individual tradesmen and craftsmen. As generations passed and families moved around, so the original identifying names developed into the corrupted but simpler versions that we recognise today. Over the centuries, most people in Europe have accepted their surname as a fact of life, as irrevocable as an act of God. However much the individual may have liked or disliked the surname, they were stuck with it, and people rarely changed them by personal choice. A more common form of variation was in fact involuntary, when an official change was made, in other words, a clerical error. A notable member of the name was Ragnar Arthur GRANIT, born in 1900. He was the Finnish born Swedish physiologist, joint winner of the Nobel prize for physiology and medicine. Educated at Helsinki University, he worked under Sir Charles Sherrington at Oxford and became professor of neuro-physiology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. As the agricultural depression of southern Italy worsened towards the end of the 19th century, people began to escape to the New World. The exodus started in earnest in 1887 with Brazil and other parts of Latin America being the original destinations. By 1893, the economy had improved in the United States and people headed there from Italy in greater and greater numbers. In 1898 there were more Italian immigrants to the USA than from any other country. In the post war era, more than a quarter of Italians left the country for a new life. They joined a flood of immigrants to America which was averaging a million a year in the pre war years. |
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