The proposed paper presents the functioning of German-origin names with their root and etymology of German origin borne by Poznań burghers in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. The source material for the study was provided by archival registers of the taxpayer of the tax on production and sale of alcoholic beverages. The work has attempted to determine the motivation behind the names and to track down their development, while the applied research method involves the motivational analysis that results in a pool of particular types of surnames that includes surnames motivated by German proper names and German appellatives. The set of all foreign surnames of the population of Poznań, amounting to nearly 20% of all onomastic materi...