The associated coat of arms for this name HAMM are recorded in J.B Rietstaps Armorial General. Illustrated by V & H.V Rolland's. This monumental work took 23 years to complete and 85,000 coats of Arms are included in this work. This English, German and Jewish surname was of two-fold origin. It was a topographic name for someone who lived by a patch of flat, low-lying land beside a stream. It was also an occupational name for a maker or user of hammers, for example in a forge. The name has many variant spellings which include HAMME, HAMMERMANN, HAMERSMA, HAMMAR, HAMREN, HAMMER and HAMMERLE. Many of the modern family names throughout Europe reflect the profession or occupation of their forbears in the Middle Ages and derive from the position held by their ancestors in the village, noble household or religious community in which they lived and worked. The addition of their profession to their birth name made it easier to identify individual tradesmen and craftsmen. As generations passed and families moved around, so the original identifying names developed into the corrupted but simpler versions that we recognise today. Over the centuries, most people in Europe have accepted their surname as a fact of life, as irrevocable as an act of God. However much the individual may have liked or disliked the surname, they were stuck with it, and people rarely changed them by personal choice. A more common form of variation was in fact involuntary, when an official change was made, in other words, a clerical error. A notable member of this name was Arnold HAMMER, born in 1899, the American business executive, born in New York. He trained as a physician at Columbia and served with the US Army Medical Corps (1918-19). In 1921, soon after taking his medical degree he went to Russia. He founded the A Hammer Pencil Company in 1925, operating in New York, London and Moscow, trading in furs. In 1957 he bought the small Occidental Petroleum Corporation of California, and turned it into a giant. In the Middle Ages heraldry came into use as a practical matter. It originated in the devices used to distinguish the armoured warriors in tournament and war, and was also placed on seals as marks of identity. As far as records show, true heraldry began in the middle of the 12th century, and appeared almost simultaneously in several countries of Western Europe.