Male First Names

I thought that I’d better look at the male given names seeing I’ve looked at female names.  In the Family Tree I’ve done for SNR there are 120 direct males ancestors with 138 names of which 42 are different. This result surprised me. I thought there would be a smaller variety of names compared to women.  The list is as follows:

John - 25

William - 17

Thomas - 12

Robert - 8

George - 8

Joseph - 6

Richard -5

Samuel - 4

James - 4

Henry - 4

Frederick - 4

Edward - 3

Albert - 3

Warner - 2

Nicholas - 2

Hugh - 2

Charles - 2

Augustus - 2

Arthur - 2

Then one occurrence of each of the following: Wilfrid, Walter, Victor, Nathaniel, Michael, Kenneth, Job, Jacob, Isaac, Ian, Herbert, Gary, Francis, Elliot, Elijah, Eli, Edmund, Douglas, David, Christian, Cecil, Alfred, Adrian.

The areas that are difficult to research are not represented and this skews the results!

If you compare these names to the ten most popular Australian names for boys in 2013, the only duplicate is William (number 4 in Australia). However, you could argue there were two additional names: Jack (no. 2) is a derivative of John and Charlie (no. 6) is a derivative of Charles.

What's in a SURNAME?

Surnames became necessary when governments introduced personal taxation. Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to "develop" and this leads to a large number of variations of the original spelling. No surname is 'fixed'!

It is believed there are over 45,000 different English surnames.

Most surnames originated from seven types:

• Occupational: based on a job or position in society [Heard, Pfeffler (pipe player), Spicer].
• Personal characteristic: based on nicknames that described a person. They may have described a person’s size, colouring, or character trait. [Bunn (from the French word ‘bon’), White, Pococke]
• Place name: where a person was born, lived, worked, or owned land. It might be from the name of a house, farm, hamlet, town, or county.  [Freestone, Kimberley (‘leah’ is a wood), Woolley]
• Estate name: name of their holdings, castle, manor, or estate, such as Ernle or Staunton.
• Geographical feature: Some examples are Bridge, Brooks, Bush, Camp. [Hilton]
• Patronymic, matronymic, or ancestral: from a given name (male or female).  Scottish clan names make up one set of ancestral surnames.  [Craig, Dixson (‘son of’), Dyson (from the Greek female name Dionysia), Harry, McCutcheon, Robinson, William/s]
• Signifying patronage: some surnames honored a patron. Hickman was Hick’s man (Hick being a nickname for Richard), Kilpatrick was a follower of Patrick.

Many surnames have more than one possible origin:

• Barry – three possible origins. It could be from the French word ‘bari’ meaning castle; from Norman/Irish origins as the descendant of Fionnbharr; or from the Scottish locational origin from the village of Barry, Angus, meaning rough, grassy hill.
• Bray –a number of possible origins: a locational name in East Berkshire or Devonshire, from the word ‘bre’ meaning hill or from ‘Brae’ in Scotland, or from the old Gaelic ‘O’Breaghdha’ indicating a native of Begia; or a nickname from the Cornish work ‘bregh’ meaning fine or brave; 
• Carne – of Cornish origins from the Cornish word ‘carn” meaning rock. It could be a geographical feature or a place name.
• Crofts – could be a nickname, a geographical feature or a place name.
• Folland – of Norwegian origin, either after location in Norway; or geographical, for a dweller of a beach where it is difficult to land ships.
• Joyce –origin is French, but was an early Irish name.  It could be a patronymic name from ‘Iodoc’ meaning ‘lord’ or it could be a place name from the village of Josse sur Mer, Calvados, Normandy.

Surnames in England also tend to be associated with, or concentrated in, particular areas and our ancestors followed this general trend. For example, the surname Bunn was from the East Anglia area; Hollebone from East Sussex; Dyson, Freestone, Hilton, Kimberley and Woolley from the north east of England (especially Yorkshire); Carne and Heard from Cornwell and Devon.

Female first names

So, what's in a name? Everyone has one, most people have a vague idea what their own means (I've always understood that Rebecca 'meant' enchanting!), but we don't really give them much more thought.

I've put together a list of SNR's direct female ancestors to look at the most frequent names. Obviously, I can go much further back on some lines, which means that potentially names from a particular region are easier to get than others, and therefore, my information is slightly skewed to those areas (I'm thinking of the wonderful records kept of Devon Churches compared to the scarce information from Ireland, or the 'difficult to negotiate' records from Germany). I've ended up with 124 names (counting both first and second names) of which there are 40 different names. I suspect that many people descended from mainly 'English' stock would have a similar list...

The list is as follows:

Mary (25)
Elizabeth (16)
Ann/e (12)
Jane (8)
Sarah (6)
Helen (5)
Catherine (4)
Ellen (4)
Alice (3)
Margaret (3)
Agnes (2)
Clara (2)
Hannah (2)
Isabella (2)
Marjorie (2)
Martha (2)
Matilda (2)
Susanna (2)

Then one occurrence of each of the following: Carey, Caroline, Charlotte, Christina, Dorothy, Eileen, Eliza, Elsie, Frances, Frederica, Gwenyth, Harriet, Isobel, Ivy, Latitia, Lily, Lorna, May, Rachel, Rebecca, Ruth, Tabitha.

These names were 'given' over a period of more than three hundred years, but I've compared them to the records of most popular names from 2013.  Needless to say, they are quite different!  In fact, the only names on the above list that also appear in the Australian, Canadian, Irish, UK or US top ten female names are Isabella (all bar Ireland), Sarah (Canada and Ireland), Charlotte (Aus) and Elizabeth (US).  These are probably names that would be considered 'old'!

Names

The study of names is called onomastics, a field which looks at linguistics, history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, philology and other obscure things. 

A first name, or given name, identifies a specific person, differentiating them from other members of a group, such as a family or clan, with whom that person shares a common surname. The name is 'given' to a person, generally at or around the time of birth, and usually by the parents.

Surnames are a hereditary name common to all members of a family. As Ancestry states: ‘Your last name gives you a sense of identify and helps you discover who you are and where you come from.’

All names have meaning: all first names and all surnames. In Western Society we don't generally get to choose our surname, and most people wouldn't even consider changing their name because of the meaning. First names are slightly different, and the amount of 'baby names and their meanings' books available would attest to that. I'm not sure that we actually chose the names of our children based on their meaning, but we certainly looked into the meaning of the names we chose.

So I’m not sure that my 'examining' the names of our ancestors is really all that informative, but it is fun!