Ancestry Magazine

Just what drives us to name a rose a rose.

Someday, when he’s a little older, Harry Wait will find out just where his name came from.

He’ll recognize that he was named Harry after his grandfather, which is true, and his great-grandfather before that. But someday Harry’s father, Andrew, will explain that Harry’s not a third but a fourth. Someday Andrew will tell Harry the story of his great-great-grandfather Levi, who lost his little sister Harriet when he was just six years old, and who grew up to name his only son in her honor—Harry. It’s a story Andrew didn’t know himself when he named his son Harry. But now that it’s uncovered, it’s a story that Andrew thinks will give his son’s name just that much more meaning.

Typically, we identify our heritage through the surname we inherit. But our given name is just that: a gift, something personal and chosen, often, with a reason.

Given names may reflect hoped-for personality traits (Mercy, Takeshi [brave], Nonhlanhla [luck]), natural wonders (Daisy, Apple, Barsha [rain]), a time or season (April, Summer), a family surname (Preston, Harrison), holy books and religious figures (Mohammed, Nathan, Ruth), royalty (William, Charles, Michiko), honored family, cherished friends, or just personal taste.

Grasping Meaning

In Ghana, a name may indicate which day of the week a child was born: Kofi, born on Friday. In China and Korea, given names may indicate family by sharing a common syllable among siblings or cousins. Names may reflect what we watch on television—soap opera characters, television personalities, even people in the news. Janet Schwegel, author of The Baby Name Countdown, notes the gains in popularity for the names Monica, Rachel, and Chandler after the popular TV sitcom Friends hit the airwaves. Or, in some cultures, your name day (a day of the year assigned to your name) can even be a bigger deal than your birthday.

While a name might say something about you, in the end, your name probably really reflects a little more about your parents. Historically, parents have consulted
fortune tellers, astrologers, and auguries and now turn to a burgeoning crop of baby name books and websites for answers to problems like “I am looking for middle names that flow with Keilana and Jaylani.”

While psychologists differ in their assessment of names, few seem to put much stock on how much influence a name really has on the person attached to it. Freakonomics author Steven Levitt points out that brothers Winner and Loser Lane took paths that ran completely opposite of their handles. But he counters that with another concept—certain naming conventions are tied to a socioeconomic ladder allowing you to link a given name with the mother’s level of education.

Regardless of what the experts think, Carolynn Clark insists she wouldn’t be a lawyer today if her parents had opted to name her Trisha instead. “I just know I’d be someone completely different,” she says. Carolynn, who thinks all given names should have a story behind them, was named for her father, whose middle name is Lynn, with the addition of Carol for its musical connotations. Her parents had the expectation that she’d be musical “like my dad.”

Dedicated Followers of Fashion
Names have always come in and out of fashion. My grandmothers were Velma, a name that peaked in popularity about 1910, and Mabel, which has never regained the heights it reached in the late 1880s. The question, however, is exactly what’s in fashion now? How did we get to a place where children are named Moxie CrimeFighter (magician Penn Jillette’s daughter)? Or to where the New York Jets select D’Brickashaw Ferguson as their first-round pick in the 2006 NFL draft?

Believe it or not, there is some precedent. Ancestry Magazine contributor Myra Vanderpool Gormley years ago noted in an article in Colonial Homes that “one peculiar naming pattern found among the back-country se
ttlers was…bestowing unusual—sometimes made-up—given names,” and that even among their cousins further east, there were some parents who apparently “shut their eyes, opened the Bible, and pointed to a word at random—what else could account for a child named Notwithstanding or Maybe?”

Still, we do seem to be in the midst of some seismic, onomastic shift toward individualism. Social Security records for 1950 indicate that almost 33 percent of boys and 23 percent of girls were given “top 10” names that year. In 2000, less than 12 percent of boys and 9 percent of girls were given that year’s top 10 baby names.

So why the change?

Laura Wattenberg, author of The Baby Name Wizard and tracker of naming trends, credits parental desire to have a child that stands out. “Over the last two generations those ‘core’ names have
started to disappear. Parents are running away from names they consider ‘ordinary.’ Individuality is assumed to be a virtue in names today—and in a networked, media-drenched world, you have to work harder than ever to find names that sound unusual.”

And so we get Darth and Datherine, Alyx and Izabell. Laura sees five trends for the future: Antique Revivals (Caleb and Heber); Foreign Imports (Natalia and Adriano); Surnames (Carter and Parker); Meaning Names (courtesy of the dictionary or roadmap come Savannah, Paisley, and Bliss); and what Laura calls “Kay-lees”—clever spellings like Kori and Brandeye.

The ironic thing, says Laura, is that “while names are getting more and more creative, I think the way we choose them is getting more and more conservative! If you look at name records from past generations, there were a lot more kids named for events around them, like Columbia for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. You’d also hear more stories of parents letting their older kids choose the ne
w baby’s name. Today, parents take the choice very seriously. People research the decision, just as they would in choosing a new car.”

What’s in a Name?
So, given their personal nature or their relative commonness, can a first name still provide a few clues to your family’s past? You can Roger that. Even for the most repeated name, family life can be represented in nicknames and naming patterns.

Nicknames
Genealogist Christine Rose knows how misleading nicknames can be. For two years, she looked for the second wife of a man whose first wife was named Martha. Why? Because his will included a wife named Patsy. “I didn’t know that Patsy was a nickname for Martha.” A recent client hadn’t realized that Jane could be a nickname for Virginia. “That would have misled him for years.”

All that mystery led Christine to write a booklet on American nicknames, with some Dutch nicknames in an appendix for good measure (these can be tricky, especially those diminutives—would you ever get Catherine from Trijntje or William from Pim?).

“People have to look at the whole name and think of where the nickname might be derived,” Christine says. “In Augustus, it came out of the middle. I have seen Chy for Zacharay. Some nicknames have no rhyme or reason, such as Eliza for Louisa, but that’s frequently found in the early records. Another one people don’t seem to know is Peter for Patrick. I was working for a family and found Peter on land grants and thought I had found another son.”

Naming Patterns
Patterns that first names take can vary widely from culture to culture, but they’re interesting and definitely worth a look.

Some families establish customs that result in juniors and seniors, IIIs and IVs. Others may repeat a name or an initial.

A common naming pattern seen among English and Irish names assigns names to sons and daughters for up to 10 children, with the first son being named for his father’s father, the second son after his mother’s father, the third son after his father, then moving on to uncles on alternating sides of the family. Girls followed a similar pattern, starting with the mother’s mother.

The Dutch followed a similar well-established pattern, naming children for grandparents, alternating between the paternal and maternal sides of the family. So you would expect to see the first two sons named for their grandfathers and the first two daughters for their grandmothers. From there, names typically moved to great-grandparents or perhaps aunts and uncles. Following the death of a child, parents would also often give the next child of the same sex the same name—a practice among many cultures.

Some African cultures may repeat the name of a famous ancestor for several generations, and given names often reflect family circumstances when the child was born. Ghanaian names sometimes reflect a child’s place in the family. Nigerian children are given three or four names from different family members, including the father, the mother, and grandparents. Boys choose from among these names and add one from their father, grandfather, or great-grandfather as they grow up.

In Ethiopia, the father’s given name becomes the child’s surname, and Scandinavian patronymic patterns will often tell you the father’s given name in his son or daughter’s surname.

Immigrants sometimes changed or translated their first names as well. When Wilhelm first came from the old country, he may well have decided to go by William in the new. Other swaps can be less obvious. Paul may have been Pavel in Russia, Paolo in Italy, Pavlos in Greece, or Pawel in Poland. James gets even trickier: Giacomo, Dimitrios, or Jacobus, to name a few.

Time or Place
Baby Name Wizard author Laura Wattenberg traces spikes in the first names Dewey and Spurgeon in the 1890s to Admiral George Dewey and to Charles Spurgeon, a popular Baptist preacher—a practice she refers to as “homage names.” Laura sees these types of names less frequently today, although she notes that there was a spike in Johnpauls in 2005. Looking at your own family history, a child in your family tree named after royalty or other important figures of a time and place may help you understand more about an ancestor’s culture and environment. It may also help explain why Katrina was voted 2005 Name of the Year by the American Name Society.

Middle Names
And never discount the power of a middle name—they can be excellent sources for maiden and other family names. When Elaine Clark was researching the parents of Thomas Wright McNeff and his brother William, the only people she could find who fit the potential profile of the parents were John Thompson McNeff and Polly Wright—not absolute proof, but pretty good odds.

Beyond clues about the past, maybe the best thing about given names is the personality they contain. Where did the name Bushrod come from? Why name this boy Job or this girl Arastacia—or Harriet? It’s tantalizing, all those names back there, all those people, and all those stories. Each one stretches back and reaches forward.

Paul Rawlins is a writer living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Upon researching his own first name, he discovered that, according to numerology, he’s a 5—a curious, innocent traveler.