Once upon a time, in a damp corner of medieval England, someone looked at a miserable patch of swamp, pitched a tent, and proudly declared, “Yes, this is it. This is home.”
In Old English, they combined mersc(swamp) and tūn (enclosure) to name it. But let’s be real: the literal translation was "shack in the quagmire."
By 1086, King William the Conqueror decided to inventory his new kingdom. He created the Domesday Book, which was essentially history’s most aggressive tax spreadsheet. William wanted to know exactly how much wealth his subjects had so he could efficiently bleed them dry. The swamp shack made the cut under the fancy new spelling Merscetone. Translation update: "shack on a farm... inside a quagmire." True upward mobility.
Fast forward to 1379 in Yorkshire. Enter King Richard II, a brilliant financial mastermind who was currently a whopping 12 years old. Because pre-teens definitely know how to run an economy, Richard decided he needed cash to fund the Hundred Years' War. His solution? The Yorkshire Poll Tax. It was a flat tax levied on every single adult over the age of 14 who wasn't actively begging on the street.
There were now two men, named William de Merston and Richard de Merston, who showed up in the registry. They each coughed up four pence. To put that in perspective, that staggering sum could buy you exactly two whole chickens or about five gallons of questionable tavern ale¹. This grand economic policy pissed off the entire country so thoroughly that it sparked the Peasants' Revolt two years later. The revolt failed, but hey, at least the peasants got to burn some stuff down.
Around a century later, people finally learned how to spell, standardizing the name as Marston. Excited for a fresh start away from teenage tyrants, four different groups of Marstons packed their bags and sailed to America, settling in Virginia, New York, and New England. Plot twist: they weren't actually related, nor did they come from the same place or arrive in America at the same time. They shared a last name, but scientifically speaking, they shared absolutely zero genetic data². Keep in mind, there was probably more than one marsh in medieval England and unrelated people may also have assumed the name of Mersctun (or the equivalent of "I live next to a swamp"). There may be more unrelated Masten's in America yet to be genetically identified for this very reason.
The main culprit behind the shift from “Marston” to “Masten” was Cornelius, son of John Marston, our first American progenitor. Cornelius moved to Kingston, New York, which was heavily populated by the Dutch. John's name had already been recorded by illiterate clerks as Mast, Maste, Mastin and Maston—because back then, spelling was a casual vibe rather than a legal requirement.
To make matters worse, the local Dutch crowd and his own mother possessed a shared linguistic trait with modern Bostonians and New Yorkers: a deep, visceral refusal to pronounce the letter "R." Facing a lifetime of exhausting corrections, Cornelius chose the path of least resistance. He ditched the consonant, embraced the clerical error, and rebranded as a Masten.
