Last name origins & meanings:
- English: unexplained.
- South German: topographic name for
someone who lived at the upper end of a village on a hill, from Middle
High German ober, obar ‘above’. In other cases, it may
have denoted someone who lived on an upper floor of a building with
two or more floors.
- North German: topographic for someone who
lived on the bank of a river or stream name, standardized from Middle
Low German over ‘river bank’.
- Possibly a shortened form of
any of various German compound names formed with Ober- (see
entries below).
- Jewish (Ashkenazic): from German Ober
‘senior’, ‘chief’. In some cases it can denote a rabbi; in others it
is ornamental.
- A 17th-century American bearer of this name, Richard Ober
(1641–1715/16), emigrated from Abbotsbury, Dorset, England, to the
Salem colony and settled in Mackerel Cove, MA, later Beverly. His
descendant Frederick Albion Ober, who was born in Beverly, MA, in
1849, was an ornithologist who discovered 22 new species of birds in
the Lesser Antilles, the flycatcher Myiarchus oberi, and oriole
Icterus oberi.
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