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I tried to trace the origins of my surname, following the genealogical tree I found on Geni.com and other historical archives.
The oldest sources that have been reported date back to 1761 and refer to Mihkel Vadi, my 7th great grandfather, but his surname is written as Waddi¹. This form, sometimes also in the variant Wadi, seems to persist until the beginning of the 20th century, when the russification of burocracy (Estonia was part of the Russian Empire since 1721) forced a cyrillic transliteration to Вади, which corresponds to the currently used Vadi, in the latin alphabet.
Regarding the meaning and the older history of the surname, I noticed that there is a village called Vadi in Mustvee Parish, Jõgeva County in northeastern Estonia, and that, at least since Mihkel Waddi, my family lived mostly around Pala Parish, which is just 30 km south of Vadi village. The name of this village, which appears in the sources for the first time in 1599, seems to be associated with the ethnic group of the Votes² (currently barely surviving in Ingria, close to the river Luga, in Russia). This is reinforced by the fact that Jõgeva County, before the Livonian Crusade (1208-1217), was part of an ancient greater territorial unit called Vaiga, which was probably inhabited by Votic people, or at least had many correlations with them (some scholars even claim that the Votes were an Iron-age tribe of Estonians, coming from this general area, who developed a separate identity during isolation from other Estonians in Ingria). Another strong piece of evidence that links the surname Vadi/Waddi to the Votes is that it shares its root with vađđ-, which in the Votic language is used to indicate anything related to that culture.
It is therefore plausible that the surname Vadi dates back to a group of Votes that, depending on how history really went, remained or had settled in Estonia despite the crusades, and that took this adjective-surname to distinguish themselves from the local estonian population.
Today survive just about 60 people (three small villages) who identify themselves as Votes and still speak the Votic language, which makes the brief research I did on this surname, if it does actually hold some truth, particularly interesting and even somewhat relevant for the preservation of the history of this ethnic group.
- Tomass Vadi
¹: http://www.ra.ee/dgs/browser.php?tid=14&iid=200220000151&lst=2&idx=...