As reported by 'Russkaya Germaniya', the compilers of the dictionary of German surnames are Germanist scholars from the Academy of Sciences and Literature (Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur) in Mainz in cooperation with the university of the same city (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) and the Technical University of Darmstadt (Technische Universität Darmstadt).
In ancient times, starting in the 13th century, previously unrecorded nicknames related to profession, place of residence, and so on, became fixed. Therefore, modern surnames preserve linguistic heritage, cultural circumstances, and psychological relationships of past centuries, traces of migration flows, and similar important historical information.
Scholars see in them not only a source for linguistic research but also for cultural anthropology, mentality, religious studies, and the like. In general, the head of the mentioned long-term project, 51-year-old Germanist Rita Heuser, is probably right when she says: 'Tell me your surname, and I will tell you who you are.'
The project's foundation was data from 'Telekom' for 2005 on the 800,000 different surnames then current in Germany. The previously existing digital dictionary of German surnames included about 70,000 surnames, that is barely 10%.
The new digital dictionary that has just appeared online already contains 200,000 surnames, each of which appears at least ten times in the Telekom database. The work in compiling the dictionary at the first stage consisted of analyzing the possibilities of reducing the number of groups of closely related surnames (Müller, Meyer, Schmidt), due to rarely occurring variants (Meyr, Mayr). At the same time, surnames were broken down by their professional meaning (Schmitt, Faber, Schmiedel, Pinkepank), as well as by formal criteria (for example, such compound words as Messerschmidt, Kleinschmidt, Blechschmidt, Schmidthuber).
Thus, a dictionary was formed with 200,000 surnames and more than 2,000 explanatory articles. On the website http://www.namenforschung.net you can already enter a surname of interest and get a detailed answer. In particular, to find out what meaning this surname had in the Middle Ages, when and where it was first mentioned, and its distribution across the territory of present-day Germany.