Family name origins & meanings
- North German : occupational name for a peddler (see Haack 1).
- North German : topographic name for someone who lived by a hedge (see Heck 2).
- North German : perhaps also a topographic name from hach, hack ‘dirty, boggy water’.
- Frisian, Dutch, and North German : from a Frisian personal name, Hake.
- Jewish (Ashkenazic) : metonymic occupational name from Yiddish hak ‘axe’.
- English : variant of Hake 1.
- George Hack (c. 1623–c. 1665) was born in Cologne, Germany, of a Schleswig-Holstein family, and emigrated to New Amsterdam where he practiced medicine and entered the VA tobacco trade. Colony records show that he and his wife, Anna, were formally made naturalized citizens of VA in 1658. He had two daughters, neither of whom married, and two sons: George Nicholas Hack, the founder of the Norfolk branch of the family; and Peter, for many years a member of the VA House of Burgesses, the founder of the Maryland branch. Hack’s descendants eventually changed the spelling of the name to Heck.