The Historical Ponderings Society

[EverySongbirdSays]

Following on from the thread "What questions do you have about stuff from History or am I the only one?" Which is here

Ever wondered how we got from the clothes of Cave people to the clothes of today?

Who was the first person to make and eat Cheese? Or cake?

How ideas became widespread

Why the Aztecs didn't have the wheel?

Why Elizabeth I never married?

How accurate historical fiction is?

Then this your thread and we are your people.

PROCEED HISTORY LOVERS

A man forced his pig and he died!

When I read it this, it sounded to me very like 'you can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink' In other workds, you can't force anyone to do anything they don't want to.

Names - I think the tudor names are a bit of a red herring. There were loads of older names floating around before that. Think of Rosamund, Eleanor, Ethelred, Edmund etc. they fell out of favour but they were there before Thomas and Richard. (and name ending in nd is old I think??)

Then the Bible names - far more than you think - Lucy is female version of Luke, Abigail Naomi, Timothy, Benjamin, etc etc , as well as the 12 disciples, all of Jacobs sons (Reuben, Joseph, Simeon, Levi,) Old testament famous people - Daniel, Noah,
Then you have the Victorian habit of using the prophets - Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezra, Amos etc.

Then add in things like names of flowers and months (also very Victorian) Lily, Rose, May April.

And then one name gets so many variations, probably due to accent, Elizabeth, Eliza, Liz, Lizzy, Betty, Bethan, Lizbet, Liza, Lisa, Beth.

My sister is on a genealogy site and informed me today that we are 5th cousin once removed of Winston Churchill.
This led me to wonder how many millions of us are descended in some way from John of Gaunt. And whether Winston was quite an 'out there' name for his year of birth.

I read somewhere that the "virtue" names - Faith, Mercy, Patience, Grace, etc - came in with the Puritans.

They also had some more exciting, if less catchy "virtue" names like e.g. If-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned, What-God-Will, Kill-Sin, Humiliation, Lament.

Ordinary biblical names weren't godly enough or some such thing. So a new fangled name trend by them, and some of the names stuck and came into common use.

my DH has a branch of the family tree based in the Black Country - a hotbed of Wesleyanism. One family have sons named Shadrach, Meshach and Abednigo, and girls named Faith, Hope & Charity. This is Victorian times.
One of my families (late 18th C, same area) has some very strange names, compounded I think by the parish clerk not knowing how to spell them. Curshon (I think possibly should be Gershon, which is a Hebrew name mentioned in the Bible); Paron which I thought at first was a mis-reading/phonetic version of Darren or Aaron - except this was a girl; Habbakuk (biblical); and Betteris, which I think is Beatrice.

Makes a change from several generations where they were all named after their parents/grandparents/aunts and uncles all named Thomas, John or William and Mary, Sarah and Ann.

And whether Winston was quite an 'out there' name for his year of birth.

The use of Winston as a first name goes back to 1620 in the Churchill family. It was the name of the Duke of Marlborough’s father, the first Sir Winston Churchill. It was the surname of that Winston’s mother. (So using surnames as first names is not some new-fangled American thing, as folks on baby name threads seem to think.)

Frideswide was in the Tudor to 50 girls names. Seems to have fallen out of favour of late, for some reason!

Makes a change from several generations where they were all named after their parents/grandparents/aunts and uncles all named Thomas, John or William and Mary, Sarah and Ann.

Oh yes. The Bearhug family tree is generations of John, Richard, William and Thomas, and Elizabeth, Mary, Anne, Jane, with the occasional Alice

It makes it confusing at times...

Except they might well have been distinguished - to their peers at any rate - by 'nicknames'?

(I lived in an area where many people had remarkably similar names but they were almost invariably known by something else. Either a nickname that had stuck with them or some diminutive/ indicator of lineage or place of residence etc etc. To the point that their 'known names' are often given in formal obituaries so that people will know precisely who has died.)

For example, I'll lay odds that many people reading this would have no idea who 'Erik Thorvaldsson' was if the name was mentioned - but say 'Erik The Red'.........

It's confusing to me, I meant, because I'm looking at a ton of them at once. It probably wasn't so confusing when you'very only got a couple at once - and you would find ways of distinguishing them in front of you.

I guess if your family name is John, but you don't know which of your children will actually make it into adulthood, you use it for lots / all of your boys

I can quite understand that. I just meant that the name on eg baptismal or other certificates may not have been the name people were actually known by. (And these 'known names' often stick with people throughout the ages.) The very devil for genealogists!

I recall Olennas, that my mother - in her early teaching days - was working in a community where the families had a great many children. She'd seen - let's call him Billy - through her class and up to Big School. Then the mother came in one year to register 'Billy'. But (said my mother) - I thought you already had a 'Billy'?

'Aye' (said the other mother) 'but his Dad was drunk on the day he went to register him and just forgot.....'

Sometimes, there's more than one explanation!

cozie

The Company of Cats. I'm intrigued to encounter someone who has lived in Newfoundland because my DF was attached to a Newfie unit during WW2.
According to him, the planners of the Dieppe landings wanted Germans listening to radio traffic not to notice that Canadian forces were on the move in preparation for the operation so Newfoundland units were moved in to the vacated camps because the theory was that German listeners wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a Canadian accent and a Newfie one.
When it was discovered that the Newfoundlanders sounded completely different - my father said they couldn't speak English - British signallers were drafted in with Scouse, Geordie and Scots accents!
The arrangement lasted through the rest of the war and DF was still with his Newfies in 1945.

A bit like the Navajo in WWII then? (Or the Choctaw in WWI.)

Now you mention it, cosietoesie, I can see the similarity. Hadn't occurred to me before.
My DB and I have been trying for years to find out more, particularly DF's assertion that they couldn't speak English, but Nfld was a dominion at the time so they were classed as British troops, not Canadian, and the records were lost when it became part of Canada.
His own army record confirms he was with them but I can find out nothing about their composition.

Names..

Anglo Saxon, like Edmund, Frideswide, Hilda
Germanic, Matilda from, Mechtilde
Norman, William, Robert etc
Plus if course biblical, Scots, Welsh, Irish, saints,

Puritan
Other countries..

When the Anglican prayer book was written the two most common names were Nicholas, the patron saint if England at one point, and Mary. There are helpful pointers in the book: "what is your name?" ( N or M).

I've always wanted to be ColdToes1DM'sdottir. When I'm ruler I shall make that the rule. DS can be DS DH son

My family took surnames into first name usage around 1750.

In some large families, you might have Big Donald, Small Donald, Black Donald, Red Donald.

Maybe someone reading will be able to give you a steer.

Have you managed to gain access to any regimental archives or were they among those lost?

Ah - you'd really like Icelandic names, Cold.

Re the same names... My stepdad (so doesn't affect me if I'm looking at records, lol) is from a small Scottish island - and they're all called Neil.

So there's Neil, big Neil, old Neil, little Neil, wee Neil, young Neil and then you get things like wee Neily pet...you'd have though middle names would be the way to go, but nope, they all have the same middle name too they always seemed to know which one they meant though.

cozietoesies I make a stab at it every so often - and lose whole days getting involved in maps of Belgium and Holland!
It wasn't the Newfoundland Regiment. It was Heavy Artillery and they don't get mentioned much. I can't find anything in the Signals Regiment records either.
I wish I had asked him more when I had the chance. He only ever talked about the war one time when it all came spilling out like a torrent.

People who've been in a war rarely talk about it in general conversation - other than the occasional jokey story or self-deprecating tale. In my experience at least.

Don't they often have nicknames though, tabulah? ( Even if in Gaelic.)