AIBU to wonder about names in the past.

My friend is called Kay, a diminutive of Kath after a family member known as Kath/Katie/Katherine. When my friend researched her family history and discovered Kath was Maria Eleanor at birth.

I had a relative who was known as Phoebe, but was Susanna, then there was Jack who was really William, Janet who was Beryl and Thomas who was Charles.

My gran was Ivy all her life. Was strange to hear her feared to Dorothy at her funeral. Born in 1915

You've made me remember this OP. Could be worse!

Thanks that’s really informative and interesting

More likely to be the housekeeper/ butler that cared than the upstairs folk.

My grandmother and her sister (born early 1900s) always went by nicknames. They thought their names were very old fashioned, so as modern young women in the 1920s they chose to use nicknames.

I have heard of situations where if you're Sarah and you turn up for a job as a maid in a household where there's a Sarah already, you become Laura or Agnes to avoid confusion. But there would have been no need to use that name in other settings, with family, with another employer. But on the other hand I've seen households where there were multiple members of staff called Mary or Jane.

I'm not so sure that employers worried too much about what their housemaid or cook was called.

My friend has the same name as his dad (and Grandad) so they all use different shortening so Liam, Will and Billy. At his wedding I was introduced to lots of his family and realised they must all do it in his family, this Uncle Jim and cousin Jamie, this is Uncle Ted and cousin Eddie, this is Uncle Rick and cousin Richard.

They have all chosen 'new' names for their children rather than passing on their recycled ones.

Some young people going into domestic service were given a "more suitable name" by their boss.

This is where the Americans have it right and avoid confusion as you have John Wayne Sr, John Wayne Jr, John Wayne III and so on.

My dad’s family are still naming the first born son John and then actually calling them their middle name. It’s ridiculous and I will not be taking part if I ever have a son. It causes so much confusion in the modern day when this isn’t commonly done.

In my family there appear be dozens of Ellens, Samuels and Herberts. It's not surprising that nicknames or pet names were used. My grandad always called my grandma "Jen". After Jenny Wren is all he would say by way of explanation. Jen/Jenny/Jennifer was not her real name.

My mother-in-law didn't like ether of her names and chose a different one when she moved countries. So all her family knew her by one name, as did medical staff and (later) carers, while her friends and husband called her another.

My mother had two terrible names and was known by her middle name which was even worse than her first name. When she joined up in WW2 someone asked her name and just blurted out a lovely name which was used until she died.

This was very prevalent on my grandfather's side of the family. His sisters were known by the names that they were given at birth. None of the boys were, which caused a lot of confusion, e.g. asking to visit a person by their 'known as' name at the hospital, thinking that we had turned up to the wrong funeral, and trying to register a death when the deceased person has three forms of ID, all under different names (including birth certificate and passport!). It only recently came out that a great-uncle wasn't actually called G; his birth certificate said that he was called L...

I suspect that it probably started as every generation seemed to have a John, James and a Peter, so they needed to differentiate... but why the same people were then known as Dennis or something is beyond me! In my grandfather's case, I think that it was more because he could never remember anyone's name (hence why a lot of my uncle's ex-girlfriends, as a teen, were most put out when my grandfather answered the phone and said, "Is that Diane?" "No! It's Sarah!" and bang went the phone on her end...). We all have alternate names that are nothing like our birth certificate names, too, so I have no idea how I knew what my real name was, and how to spell it, when I went to primary school.

I have always said that the family tree should have had 'Sarah Elizabeth Smith, known as Catherine' on it, rather than just the names on their birth certificates!

This thread is fascinating !

On my Mum’s side of the family, out of seven girls and three boys only two of them went by their given names .
On my Dad’s, all the names were traditional Welsh ones and mostly stuck to ,except Uncle Ianto who was baptised Evan, after his father .
I’ve never met anyone with the same Christian name as my Dad.

We had an elderly (now deceased) Aunt and Uncle whereby she always called him by a different name.

Say his actual name was John, she would call him Fred - based on her belief that he had puppy dog eyes and you would call a dog Fred but would probably not call it John!!

This is very common in the US, a girl is born as Susan Brown, she marries Mr White, and becomes Susan Brown White with Brown as a middle name. It's not something we usually do here unless the two surnames are double barrelled.

Some people/cultures do/did this - giving boys middle names but not girls - as it's often assumed that girls will use their maiden names as a middle name after they marry.

My DH's parents (born in 1917 and 1921) both went by their middle names throughout their lives. FIL was the eldest son so was given the same first name as his own father, Frederick, but to differentiate him was always called by his middle name, Vernon. Nobody ever could work out why MIL's parents had bothered to name her Muriel Barbara when from the day she was born they simply called her Barbara.

One unanticipated consequence of this was that DH, as a youngster, upon seeing his letters to his parents addressed to "F. Vernon Surname" and "M. Barbara Surname" decided very logically that these abbreviations stood for "Father Vernon Surname" and "Mother Barbara Surname"...

Absolutely not true in my family.

I taught in Spain for a while. Very complicated. Maria-Jesus was a woman, Jesus-Maria was a man. Jose-Maria was a man, Maria-Jose was a woman. Many women (as in Ireland) were Maria but didn't use it so you'd have Maria Del Mar known as Mar, Maria de las Nieves known as Nieves, and then Maria de la Concepcion known as Concha. I was teaching adults who had all been born in the pre-1975 Franco era.

Start of every class I'd sit there with a class list of endless Maria and a pencil and have to write in what they were really known as.

It's bizarre, isn't it? What is even the point on having a name anyway, if it isn't to distinguish you from other people?

They may just as well have named all of their children 'Person' and left it at that!

It’s unusual in young men, but Mary was a fairly common middle name for Irish boys in the past. My dad and his brothers, born in the 1940s and 50s, all had Mary as their middle name.

My grandmother always called my grandfather John as she didn't like Stanley. His father Frederick was called Jim. No idea who called them which names otherwise.