Genealogy Chat

This happens in quite of alot of my families, often the eldest son seems to have mums surname added. It also happens a lot with my lightermen/watermen - Im thinking that it was such a closed shop community/trade that everyone wanted to show they were interconnected. Im just grateful they do it!

Thank you everybody who replied. It does look as though the answer to my question is YES it is just a coincidence, that my families which only later became related by marriage adopted the practice about the same time. Only one seems to have kept it up for more than another generation. Plenty of reuse of forenames though, but that is pretty universal, I think. In some cases the older children did have two names, but not ones that look like surnames, though Annie's point about Saunders is certainly food for thought - and many surnames are also forenames. John and Charles spring to mind, as indeed does Alexander, but there must be many more.

I have several of these on my tree in the 1800s most around 1840s and all of them in south Norfolk, the most silly first name i have is Kettle which was his mothers maiden name. Caroline

The practice seems to have been dropped in recent 'modern' generations, however when I went to school in the mid 70's I remember many of my peers still carrying these 'family' names and often being embarrased about them.

I certainly have this practice before 1845 as well. I find on later census's the men tended to drop their first name after their son had been born and given the same name. Thus I have Samuel Blacker has son Samuel Palmer Blacker has son Samuel Palmer Blacker census father's name Palmer Blacker son Samuel Blacker. One tip even what looks like a normal middle name can be a family surname. I had Alexander Whithers becomming Saunders Whithers on a later census and had assumed Saunders was an old shortening of Alexander however I have recently found his grandfather another Alexander marrying Elizabeth Saunders.

I also have one branch of the family where sons were given what I would consider to be surnames as christian names, but their brothers were called sensible things like David and Thomas. One was Thornton and one Smith.

Are they all in the same area? Maybe the parish clerk just started to include more details in the register. The previous one maybe didn't include middle names?

I think you'll find that this is a tradition that goes back further than 1845 - although perhaps your family only adopted this method of naming at around that time. I have a a few branches of my tree where they used maiden names as a middle name for the sons - and within one family they have given one son the grandmother's maiden name but another couple of sons their mother's maiden name. They, in turn gave some of their sons their grandmother's maiden name, others their wife's maiden name. I have a feeling that because all the families were giving their children the same first names (eg in my example, each family had sons named John, Joseph, Christopher, Charles, William - so there would be half a dozen John's, half a dozen Williams all born around the same time etc) , it was a way of differentiating one cousin from the other. As strange as it seems now, I suppose it did have its practical side LOL I should also mention that in some cases, giving the mother's maiden name as a middle name happened if the mother was a second wife of the husband and it was a way of showing that this particular child was born to that particular mother, not the first wife. Sometimes the children were not baptised with these unusual middle names but 'adopted' them for themselves later on in life.

I have noticed that in three of my lines, the parents of children born after 1845 have begun to include the mother's maiden name as a middle name, whereas the older children have 'ordinary' forenames.. I am wondering if anyone else has the same in their tree, and if so, any ideas as to why it should happen at that particular time?