Persons
A surname that most likely began as a plural patronymic, meaning “the family or descendants of a person called Person.”
The #9,064 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 85,620 Americans shares it.
Etymology
Persons is usually explained as a patronymic surname built on the medieval personal name Person, itself a short form of Peter or a related name from Latin Petrus via Old French. The final -s is the common English family-name ending meaning “son of” or, more loosely, “belonging to the family of.” In that sense, Persons would originally have meant “Person’s descendants” or “the people of Person.”
History
The surname is found in English records in several spellings and has long coexisted with other surnames formed from personal names plus -s, such as Williams and Roberts. It is also easy to confuse with the ordinary plural noun persons, so older documents can be tricky to interpret. In the United States the name appears in modest numbers and is typically treated as an English hereditary surname.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
Because it looks like an everyday English word, Persons is one of those surnames that can hide a very old medieval family-name origin in plain sight.
From the historical record
“PERSONS OR THINGS RELATING TO RELIGION. X rudence Sidney Mary- Jane Moses Caroline Mai'ia Margaret”
— Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom