What's in a name?

I signed up (because I have so  much spare time) for an on-line course about researching Polish-American genealogy. As most of you know, the Gontarek line migrated here from Poland in the late 1800's. As part of my class 'homework,' I was supposed to do some research on what 'Gontarek' means.  As part of my research, I emailed Fred Hoffman, who wrote a book about Polish surnames. Here is what he had to say about Gontarek:

'The late Polish name expert Prof. Kazimierz Rymut mentions this name in his book _Nazwiska Polakow_ [The Surnames of Poles]. He lists it under names derived from _gont_, "roof shingle." GONTAREK would come from _gontarz_, "one who makes or sells or installs roof shingles." So it's one of many names that referred to an ancestor's occupation. The -ek ending is diminutive, so that GONTAREK could have meant "little shingler." That could have been an affectionate diminutive, a reference to an ancestor's size, or another way of saying "son of the shingler."'