Naming Conventions
Perhaps our ancestors didn't name their children after fruit, car makes or holiday locations but they were not adverse to mixing it up a bit through design and error.
Early to mid 1800's and earlier, Scottish naming conventions tended to follow a simple formula:
First Son - named after father's father
Second Son - named after mother's father
Third Son- named after father
First Daughter- named after mother's mother
Second Daughter- named after father's mother
Third Daughter- named after mother
After the third child of a particular gender it seems to progress onto father fathers brothers etc. This is quite a handy guide when sorting through possible hits but is NOT a cast iron rule and seems to fade out as the 1800's progress. Families could also take a liking to making boys names female by adding "ina" at the end such as Thomasina, Georgina and even Hughina. In Aberdeenshire they didn't even try to make any changes to names and my wife's ancestry includes a couple of women named Gordon. At first I thought this was a transcription error but further research confirmed the ladies were indeed called Gordon- no "u"'s on Old Parish Records to show the priest was unsure of the childs' gender- 100% female. Gordon is a bit of a pre-occupation in Aberdeenshire and I have also come across a man born in the early 1900's as "Garden" and others with many variations on this theme. The Gordon females, incidentally, were born and raised in Stirlingshire which perhaps hints at Aberdeenshire origins as yet undiscovered as part of the depopulation of the Highlands in favour of the Industrial lowlands.
These variations probably link into the next factor that needs to be considered when researching Scottish Ancestry- regional accents. A thick accent can often cause a childs name at birth to be misunderstood, especially if an English or Scots speaking priest had to understand a Gaelic speaking couple. A classic example from my own research that momentarily confused and then amused me was a McGillivary in Perth. She was born Magdalene McGillivary but her marriage certificate was proving hard to locate until I left only the first initial for her first name and, happily, there she was. Not Magdalene but as.... Magagbie! Now perhaps her accent was particularly coarse, she may have had a speech impediment, the priest was deaf (it was a service carried out in the Relief Church due to their poor status and a deaf priest was perhaps all they could manage!) or a wicked combination of all three but it was certainly the best corruption of a name I have come across so far! Name abbreviations can also wreak havoc with both William and Williamina being shortened to Wm. and so on. As the documents get older and older, writing styles also change to throw another spanner in the works and as anyone will know from studying documents from the 1500's-1700's, scripts such as Secretary Hand can look like a foreign language until you "get your eye in".
When people who weren't landed or perhaps had no strong clan affiliation had to fashion a family name for themselves they tended to adopt surnames denoting a profession (Tailor, Fisher, Smith etc) and then, as time moved on, when social structures moved from feudalism to democracy, political figures and early "celebrities" began to influence naming. As an example I have researched a Coleman O'Loughlin who may have been named after the well known Irish Judge and Politician Sir Colman O'Loghlen. I also came across a naming convention in East Lothian (Haddington) that was new to me - a child had a middle name that had no context in family tradition. Further conversations with my clients family revealed that the child had taken the surname of the local General Practitioner (GP) as a middle name and this was a common practice in that part of the country at the time.
For our part, we have been fairly traditional in the naming of our son and daughter with each taking their grandfathers and grandmothers names respectively as their middle names. Genealogists of the future may need to pay more attention to archived copies of coffee table magazines and newspapers to make sense of names like "Harper 7", "Apple" and "Moon Unit" but snatches of tradition continue despite modern fads, much as they have done throughout history.
"Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable." ~W.H. Auden
Naming conventions have always fascinated me. I have seen evidence of what you're describing in my U.S. research, also - no surprise, since those I'm researching mostly came from the UK and likely shared those traditions! Current trends are for the father to name his first-born son after himself (it was done with my father, too) and I was surprised to find so many families with the third or fourth son having the father's name in my research. But then, going back further, I would find that, indeed, the eldest son was usually named for a father or grandfather - it can be helpful in families to knit them together, especially when the surnames are common. Thanks for the good insights!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment.
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting that US naming tends to go straight for the father's name as the first born sons name - is it the same with daughters and mothers? In my mind I would, rightly or wrongly, imagine that it would make a kind of sense for people arriving in the US for the first time to look back no further than themselves for naming inspiration - brave new world and a harsh existence to start with. That, however, may be romantic twaddle on my part and has no basis in research - any thoughts?
Hopefully, as my blog progresses, you'll find it useful - welcome aboard!