What's In A Name??

 

Be it your own name or that of your parents or grandparents, every story starts with a single name.

 A well-known commercial family history website advertises that all you need to do is enter a name in the search box and all this information will come tumbling out. If only it was that simple!

It doesn’t take long to discover that families had naming traditions. The most obvious one is that the first born son would be named after the father and the first born daughter would be named after the mother. You soon find long lines of male ancestors sharing the same name. In my own family William Armstrong is a name that goes back into the 18^th century. My wife’s family has a line of Thomas Anderson going back to the 1820s and a line of Robert Ramseys going back to 1789. You find the same names repeat themselves in families so the siblings of each generation often share names so you will have long lists of James, David, Sarah or Susan.

A lot has been written about Scottish naming traditions and there is a basic pattern as follows:

·        The first son was named after the father’s father.

·        The second son after the mother’s father.

·        The third son after the father.

·        The first daughter after the mother’s mother.

·        The second daughter after the father’s mother.

·        The third daughter after the mother.

But it doesn't always work like that but it can provide a clue and guide to previous generations. 

Another tradition that you find is that if a child died in infancy, then the next child would be given that name so you will find families will have had 2 sons called Edward, born about 3 years apart. This can get confusing when looking for them in censuses and you need to be careful to thoroughly check that you have the right person.

 In my own family, the use of middle names has helped to differentiate between Williams – it gets very confusing if you have too many Bills in a household!

The pattern for middle names follows the alphabet from my great grandfather William Buchan Armstrong, my grandfather William Cunningham and my father William David and so on. This then starts one thinking about where do these middle names come from – is there a theme?

Cunningham was my great great grandmother’s maiden name but where does Buchan come from? William Buchan’s grandmother’s maiden name was Tait, not Buchan and I have found no trace of Buchan as a family name so far. My father’s middle name was David and although this is a name that is repeated in the Armstrong family, he always told me he was given the name after my grandfather’s best friend.

Middle names are often maiden names of grandmothers, my 2 x great aunt was Susan Tait Armstrong, named after her grandmother. My own mother’s middle names were Bellingham, her grandmother’s maiden name, and Campbell, her mother’s maiden name.

Surnames too can cause problems and issues along the family history journey. My wife’s great grandfather, Robert Ramsey, was actually registered as Robert Vyse. He was born out of wedlock and his parents didn’t marry until he was 2 years old. On his marriages he is listed as Robert Vyse but on the census he is listed as Robert Ramsey. To add to the confusion his second wife sometimes used the surname Ramsey-Vyse.

Surnames can change over time too. Going back through the generations the surname Vyse was originally Vice and another surname on my wife’s side, Havenhand was originally Evenhand.

So yes, a name is the starting point of any family history journey but as you can see it is just the first step in a long, and sometimes frustrating but ultimately satisfying and potentially never ending journey.