A genealogy question on Mastodon, about households containing people with identical names, started me thinking about the number of different version of names we find in old documents and I wondered if it might be explained by the tendency in times past to name children after parents or grandparents, or other significant family members. Perhaps Maggie, Molly, Peggy and Meg didn’t just develop as cute nicknames for little girls, but as a matter of convenience to make it easy to distinguish between all the Margarets in the family.
I was also reminded of the thoughts below which I wrote a while ago, after seeing a slightly heated discussion on facebook between an experienced genealogist, trying to explain how a William and a Bill could be the same person, and a novice who was convinced that her relative must be a particular (possibly wrong) William Jones and not the much more likely Bill Jones, because no one in the family ever referred to him as Bill.
Our name is a label of social convenience, and while it has very strong social significance, it can and does change with circumstance. Some names change deliberately, by choice, or by marriage, while others change by accident – misspelling, misunderstanding. The advent of more efficient record keeping and higher levels of education has made some of the accidental changes less likely, but the further back in time we go the more likely it is that trying to rigidly adhere to ONE NAME for a person will cause more problems than it solves.
Mary Anna Smith could appear in records as Maryanne Smith, Mary Smyth, Mary Smythe, Mary Smithers, Marian Smith and later in life as Mrs Mary Brown, or even Hannah M Brown.
A person is NOT defined by a NAME, our existence in a family tree is defined by having a recorded date of birth/baptism and recorded parents. Naming patterns in may societies may result in a family tree having several “John Smiths” with various relationships to each other… father/son uncle/nephew, cousins, grandparent/grandchild. The thing that defines WHICH John Smith we are looking at is the relationships. Most particularly the birthdate/parent combination.
In the case of women who take their husbands name at marriage, the marriage record provides the link between the new and old name, and hopefully enough information about parents names, to allow us to link the death of “Mary Brown” to the birth of the correct “Mary Smith”.
Categories: opinion
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