A question about naming conventions of the 18th century.

[OnionPatch]

Last edited Sun Jan 18, 2015, 03:11 PM - Edit history (1)

I've been searching and searching for a 4x great grandfather who was supposed to be living in Washington County, PA around 1800. I've searched every record I can find for him but can only find another man with the same name. I ruled this guy out at first because he had a wife and children that didn't match up to my family.

However the closer I look, the more clues I keep finding that point back to this man and the possibility that he was married twice, first to the mother of my direct ancestor and two other children as a young man and later to another woman at the age of 37. The dates and all the clues I'm finding (including other family ties and even possible autosomal DNA links, etc.) line up perfectly for this theory except this: There is a child named Mary and a child named John in both batches of children. I feel I can probably rule him out because of this. Or....could someone in that time period actually have named some of his children from a second wife the same names as some of his children from a first wife? His first children would have been nearly grown by the time he had the second batch and both sets of children would have been living in different towns, about a hundred miles apart. Still, no one would do that in this day and age. Too bad I can't find a will.

[kdmorris]

1. It was fairly common, actually

I've seen a lot of this, especially in German families (a large part of Pennsylvania was settled by Germans - half of my Carbaugh ancestors had this going on). It would be even more common if the first "family" has grown up and moved away.

This link describes it fairly well, but does go into the "two children of the same name":

Whenever a duplicate name occurred in these patterns, the next name in the series was used. If a child died in infancy the name was often reused for the next child of the same gender. A rare twist occurred sometimes. A child's name would be reused when a spouse died and the surviving spouse remarried and had more children with the next spouse. I found this happened when a spouse had children in Germany and then his spouse died. He left his children behind in Germany, possibly with the grandparents, and then emigrated to Pennsylvania. Sometime after arrival he remarried and named his eldest son born in Pennsylvania by his new spouse with the same name as the son still living in Germany. This results in two adult children with the same name.

Edited to add: I also have an ancestor of English descent that did this. He and his first wife had 5 children who grew to adulthood and then his wife died. He married a younger woman and they duplicated 3 of the names from the first "batch" of children (Elizabeth, Walter and James) in the second "batch" of 9 children. The older 5 kids had moved from New York to Michigan, so there wasn't really much chance that they would meet their younger same-named siblings.

http://www.kerchner.com/germname.htm

[OnionPatch]

2. That's interesting. So it's possible, then.

Thanks for the links. These families were Scottish but it sounds like this kind of thing wasn't limited to the Germans.

This man would have left the area of my ancestors right around when the youngest of his three children (if they were his children) was married. He seemingly left those married children (and a buried wife) behind and moved about 100 miles west, into Ohio where he married a second woman and proceeded to have five children with her. She was quite a bit younger than he. I found one of their descendants in my autosomal DNA matches but of course that's no proof, only a clue.

And yes the two batch of kids would definitely have been separated although one of the clues I found on this family was that a grandchild from each batch of his children migrated to Iowa in the mid-1800s possibly in the same wagon train, lived in the same town and were buried a block away from each other.

[pipi_k]

3. Frustrating problem

For those of us of French Canadian descent as well.

Often, children in the same nuclear family had the same names, albeit often hyphenated.

As well as the custom of naming children after saints, parents in New France and Lower Canada also liked to use hyphenated double-first names (e.g. Jean-Baptiste; Marie-Madeleine) and might also choose to name all the boys (or girls) in the family with identical first names, using the second given names in the hyphenated double first name as a means of differentiation (e.g. Jean-Baptiste, Jean-Paul, Jean-François; Marie-Marguerite, Marie-Charlotte, Marie-Madeleine). Confusion results when documents use only one-half of a hyphenated double-first name in a document (e.g. either Jean or Baptiste rather than Jean-Baptiste); or when a given name and a middle name are mistaken for a hyphenated double-first name. [2] Difficulties are compounded when parents reuse a given name for a newborn child after an older sibling with the same name dies. Moreover, families in Quebec and Lower Canada were partial to using the same given names over and over, christening children after their grandparents or godparents (who were often aunts or uncles). As a result it is not uncommon to find several individuals of similar age, living in the same community or parish, bearing identical given names and surnames.

I've run into that problem lots of times in my own family tree


http://people.ucalgary.ca/~hdevine/naming.htm

[Spider Jerusalem]

4. One of my ancestors was a John Wise of Virginia, who named two of his sons "John"

with the younger "called Johannes for distinction's sake" (this was in the 17th century).

And another of my ancestors was a Mareen Duvall (Marin du Val) who emigrated to Maryland; he named two of his sons , one by each of his wives, "Mareen".

So at least some English and French families did it, as well as Germans.

[DURHAM D]

5. Also common in my German and English ancestors.

However, it seems like everyone (male and female) commonly used just their middle names, even on marriage certificates and on death certificates.