Hi, like most people, my family have the same old names repeated every generation - kings of England for the boys and common biblical names for boys and girls. So when there's an exception it leaps out at you. Early on I have Imri and Enoch.
Imri is biblical and so rare in this country (not abroad, how about footballer Imre Varadi?) that you can search Ancestry on christian name alone and not get many hits. It turns out ours was pinched from a local squire, but I don't know where he got it from. A nephew got the same name and gets transcribed as Lurri, Envi....
Enoch is commoner but unknown in our family until William Enoch Skelcey. His mother died giving birth to him and he was brought up by his aunt Elizabeth Enock (sic) and seemingly was given that middle name for that reason. He seems to have gone by the name Enoch to distinguish himself from all the other William Skelceys in Cubbington.
Which brings me to this question: if Enock is a surname it ought to be a patrionymic which means the name Enoch must have been around during the times when surnames were evolving. And so must other, commoner patrionyms.
Yet I'm struck by the almost complete absence of certain names in my (and as far as I can tell) other trees throughout most of the C19th. The most obvious is Peter - why should that be? - but also Michael (found only in Irishmen) Stephen, Phillip, Paul, Christopher, Roger, Matthew, Neil and others that became popular enough from the 1880s onwards. Yet they must have been popular during the surname formation period - not just the obvious names but Perkins, Mitchell, Hipkins, Kitson, Hodges, Dodgson and so on tell the story.
After about 1880 my family start to get more inventive. My youngest three great aunts were Mabel, Rosa and Lois - new names for the family, and elsewhere appear Sybil, Wilhelmina, Cecil, Cyril, Gladys - old-fashioned names now but then perhaps quite trendy!
Beware mistranscription as always. I was sure "Silly Corbett" was wrong - even in the days of "be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever" that surely couldn't have been one of the virtues? True, she was "Sibly" on another census and "Sybil" at birth - they couldn't spell.
Chris
