"What's in a Name?"
We named our daughter after my wife’s grandmother, Aletta Maria de Hont
I was named after my grandfather, Lyle Keith Day. Well, at least my middle name. A cousin was lucky enough to receive his full name. A brief look at my cousins and grandparents reveals no naming pattern, but some consistency that more than one grandfather passed on part of their name, Chester, Keith, Charles. I wanted to name a son Frederick after a beloved grandfather, but after the birth of five daughters, I never had a chance to name a son. However that family naming pattern still continued with my children, receiving as middle names that of a cherished aunt, and my own saintly mother. One was privileged to be named after my wife’s Dutch grandmother.
My grandfather, Lyle Keith Day
In consideration of Shakespeare’s favorite line from Romeo and Juliet, “What’s in a name”, the question is, does it matter? Juliet didn’t think names mattered, that a name isn’t who you really are, and that a person’s name could be interchanged. Yet parents do take effort to start their children off right in life by giving them a name. Sometimes to set them apart from the crowd, sometimes setting them up to be one of a thousand Liams or Charlottes in their future school class. Names can be used to carry on a tradition, like King George VI, or to honor a loved ancestor.
When it comes to genealogy, naming patterns in some countries make it easier to trace generations backward in time than others. Within the United States, there doesn’t seem to be any standard cultural expectations or assumptions when naming children. Though there may be some regional oddities like Utah’s tendencies toward random, unusual spellings of common names. (Think Kahnrad instead of Conrad, A’bri instead of Aubrey, or my favorite Xristian). The lack of a cultural standard doesn’t mean that some patterns don’t exist. As I mentioned some of my family members have names connected to ancestors. I’ve seen some families that give all their children the mother’s maiden name as a middle name. Though the inclusion of mother’s maiden names isn’t common, except in Hispanic cultures.
Scandinavia is well known for patronymics in the naming of children. The practice of a child’s last name being their father’s first name. For those immigrating to the US, the last name always became permanent once they arrived in the US. As a result, I’m surprised that my mother’s maiden name wasn’t Nielsen instead of Thompson.
Great-great-grandfather, Frederick Christian Thomsen
My great-great-great grandfather Niels Thomsen was born in Albaek, Denmark in 1815. The son of Thomas Madsen. Niels’ oldest son, Frederick Christian, immigrated to the United States as a young man in 1869. Had patronymics continued, his name would have been Frederick Christian Nielsen, but the last name Thompson had become permanent as he came to this country.
While searching out my wife’s Dutch ancestors, we learned that patronymics was also common in the northern Netherlands province of Friesland. In addition to occasion pockets of that naming pattern in the main capital of Amsterdam. One early experience with this was in researching my wife’s 8th great-grandfather, Abraham Sackleu. We searched for his marriage record in Amsterdam in 1707, but couldn’t find it until we noticed a note in the margins of the marriage register indicating that Abraham Isaakse had married Anna Hendrikse, and that just a few years later took the last name Sackleu. With that information, we were able to push the family tree back two more generations to Isack Abrahamsz and Abraham Jansz, who was born in Amsterdam in 1605. But without the clue into the use of patronymics in Amsterdam, we never would have made that progress.
My wife’s 8th great-grandfather, Abraham Sackleu’s marriage record
In addition to patronymics, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Dutch had a fairly consistent pattern of naming their children after parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. This helps in doing genealogy, as it provides some secondary evidence to help determine the next generation backwards in the family tree. The tradition of having children named after relatives is so strong, that as children died before reaching adulthood, parents would name the next child by that same ancestral name. An example of this is Jakobus Zakkleu and his wife Grietje Lindenberg. Out of the twelve children they had between 1747 and 1765, they only used seven different names. Anna, Maria, Jacobus, and Sara all died, and another sibling with the same name joined the family a year or two later. I have heard some genealogists take this as the parent’s indifference to children, so that their names were interchangeable, and that the replacement of one Anna with another was callous, and showed their lack of feeling. Rather, I believe it to reveal a strong desire to honor their relatives, and to have a child named after their ancestors survive into adulthood.
As family history is researched, and genealogy traced backward in time, there may not be clear patterns in naming. Perhaps there will be. But hopefully paying attention to names will help provide clues into the relationships between our family members, and will help identify more ancestors than we currently have in our family tree.