Family surnames as first names.

[Rosinish]

Great coincidence there McG,

Must have been good when you realised the actual connection/reason.

Annie

[Rosinish]

Sinclair used as a forename but also with a female version of Sinclairina (Scotland) although elsewhere too was fascinating to discover.

Of my mother and her 7 siblings, only one didn't have a former family surname as a middle name. Her mother, my gran had two.

Lucky you Seoras 

What is really annoying is when you find a middle name which is obviously a surname but you have no idea where it came from. 

Can relate to that Bev, still searchin where the middle name Morris appeared from as I haven't found anyone with that surname (YET)!

Annie

[Rena]

My gt grandfather was named Robert Thomas Blake Shearing, whose father had named him in favour of the man who gave him his first job = Thomas Blake.

One of my cousins and her husband gave their son one name and that was of an old estate in Scotland.  This was a recognition of which branch of the Clan he and his father originated from.

[clairec666]

Surnames as middle names are fairly common (including my grandfather), it's less common to find them as first names, though I have a branch of my family where there are a lot of boys named Johnson, even decades after Miss Johnson married into the family.

Often a surname-as-middle name comes from the mother's maiden name, but sometimes it comes from an earlier generation. It's helped me trace one line of family - I have a Robert Seager Dash who takes his middle name from his maternal grandmother's family. I found the link by putting the surname Seager into familysearch and eventually finding a link to Robert's mother.

[Millmoor]

I have a number of people on my tree with these first names: Chancellor, Farrer  and Attiwell (sometimes Attwell or Ottewell). Note these are first names and not middle names. Just doing a search using unusual first names like these, and nothing else, can be highly informative. I recently did this on the new Scotland's People for the first name Chancellor and came to the conclusion that they are probably all connected and that the name emanated, and not through kinship, from the Chancellor family who owned Shieldhill in Libberton, Lanarkshire.

William

[Greensleeves]

In my Suffolk family it was not unusual for daughters who married and lost their maiden name, to give that name to one of their sons as a first name.  The downside of this was that the surname was Pearle...  I often think how those poor lads must have suffered!

[Andrew Tarr]

I've mentioned before how my gt-gt-grandfather commemorated several of his (and his wife's) ancestors in naming his offspring.  He was only forced to think outside the box at about the seventh child - which helped me a great deal in deciding who some further ancestors may have been, in particular his wife's parents, whose surname had been wrongly recorded at their marriage in 1806.

[Jomot]

My husbands Great Grandfather gave one of his sons the forenames William Ewart Gladstone.   

No prizes for guessing his political alliances then 

[ScouseBoy]

I have a number of people on my tree with these first names: Chancellor, Farrer  and Attiwell (sometimes Attwell or Ottewell). Note these are first names and not middle names. Just doing a search using unusual first names like these, and nothing else, can be highly informative. I recently did this on the new Scotland's People for the first name Chancellor and came to the conclusion that they are probably all connected and that the name emanated, and not through kinship, from the Chancellor family who owned Shieldhill in Libberton, Lanarkshire.

William

     Have you  seen many with the first name  Garner