Greek alpha, before that Phoenician aleph — "ox".
A
the Semitic name meant an ox, and the Phoenician sign was a drawing of a horned head. Greek borrowed the shape and dropped the meaning: alpha means nothing at all. Turn A upside down and the horns come back.
Adams · Aguilar · Allen · Alvarez · Anderson · Andrews · Archer · Armstrong · Arnold · Bailey · Baker · Bakker · Barker · Barnes
In the modern alphabet this letter is number 1 of 26. It opens the row; B comes next. The order itself is inherited: Latin took it from Greek, Greek from Phoenician, and the sequence has survived largely unchanged for about three thousand years. Every rearrangement since has been an insertion, not a reshuffle.
This is a vowel: the syllable rests on it, and vowels set the rhythm of a name. In a corpus of 315 surnames this letter opens 9 and closes 8. Among the 96 given names in the base it appears in 73. The surname carrying the most of it is Salazar, with 3.
James · Michael · William · David · Richard · Thomas · Charles · Daniel · Matthew · Anthony · Mark · Paul
These letters came from the Greek alphabet.