Fred Ruhe said: The book mentioned by Roberson does not appear to list this information either.
http://www.lynxeds.com/product/bird-families-world .
This is a task that the Bird Forum collective could perform. It is not easy . There is Bock 1994. The first family listed by Roberson is Struthionidae. The author listed on a few internet sites is Latham 1790.
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/226470#page/15/mode/1up . Struthiones does not seem to be the precursor of Struthionidae? Vigors 1825 supposedly is the author of Struthionidae but I have not seen the OD.
Vigors 1825 is [
this].
The Code does not regulate order names, but its letter does not really forbid that a family-group name be proposed for a taxon originally ranked as an order either. The only requirement that addresses original rank is that the name "11.7.1.2. be clearly used as a scientific name to denote a suprageneric taxon and not merely as a plural noun or adjective referring to the members of a genus", which fixes a lower, but no upper limit. Bock 1994 recognised two names (his Gallini and Glareolidae) that were originally used for "Ordnungen" by C.L. Brehm (
Brehm 1830 and
Brehm 1831, albeit Bock appears to have overlooked the former); Brehm's system was a bit unconventional by today's standards, however: what he called "Familien" were infrageneric subdivisions, and he used already established family-group names, quite a few of which he attributed to their correct authors ("Ardeidae Leach", etc.) at the rank of Ordnung. Also, historically, the Commission has called names introduced for orders family-group names. E.g., the Ordnung name "
Coraces Naumann 1822" [
here] was rejected by [
Direction 58] as an incorrect subsequent spelling of "Coraciidae (correction of Coracinia Rafinesque 1815)", claiming it had
Coracias as its "type genus". A rather absurd conclusion, IMHO (
Coraces was certainly never "formed from" the genus name
Coracias;
coraces is a simple plural of
corax, a Latin word borrowed from the Greek meaning "raven";
Coraces is a name for corvids, which in many early works including this one happened to include
Coracias; as used by Naumann 1822, this name has no type genus -- it is taken directly from the Latin language; a family-group name with the exact same original spelling is available from A.E. Brehm 1866 [
here], for a taxon excluding
Coracias, type genus
Corax Brehm 1857 [
OD], a synonym of
Corvus Linn. which didn't exist yet in 1822) but, at any rate, this suggests that being used at the rank of order does not always preclude being afforded family-group name status.
OTOH, a family-group name must be "formed from the stem of an available generic name [which] must be a name then used as valid in the new family-group taxon". Early suprageneric names were either newly-formed plural descriptive terms ("Palmipedes", "Steganopodes", and the likes), or the plural form of a pre-existing classical Latin/Greek word ("Gallinae" of Linnaeus, plural of Latin
gallina = poultry). Unfortunately, in the latter case, it is far from exceptional that the very same classical words were also, at some point, introduced as generic names. E.g., four of the six original 1758 Linnaean bird order names are the plural form of words also now used in the singular for genera -- Accipitres is the plural of
Accipiter, Picae that of
Pica, Anseres that of
Anser, Passeres that of
Passer -- but Linnaeus 1758 used none of these as a generic name; all four are taken from Brisson 1760. Of course, if the names of a suprageneric taxon and that of a genus are both formed from the same classical term, the suprageneric taxon name will look like it was "formed from" the generic name, but this may not at all be how things actually happened.
Struthio (nominative plural
struthiones), an ostrich, is a classical Latin word; none of Latham's suprageneric names is clearly formed from an included generic name that would not also be a classical word. It seems at best questionable that Latham's intent was really to create a suprageneric taxon name "from" that of an included genus.
That being said, at the end of the day, the requirements and their interpretation (where you "place the limit") are a mere convention.
In birds, there is some kind of 'tradition' to accept the names of Rafinesque 1815 as earliest available family-group names; some would prefer to reject them and start with Leach 1819/1820; others accept some names from Illiger 1811. The 'tradition' is not very old, though -- it dates back from the late 1980s only.
Mammal guys appear to reject Rafinesque entirely, taking most of their earliest names from [
Gray 1821] (e.g., Delphinidae Gray 1821 - [
McKenna & Bell 1997], [
Wikipedia]; not Delphinia Rafinesque 1815 [
here], which is undoubtedly available by ornithological standards), with the odd exception like Cervidae, which is attributed to [
Goldfuß 1820] (
cf. [
McKenna & Bell 1997], [
Wikipedia]), a work very close to Illiger's and that was superbly ignored by Bock.