Scottish Family Names

[Sgt_Tollers]

Hello everyone,

I don't know if anyone else out there knows the following, but I was recently given a book on family history for my birthday, and I found the below quote very interesting:

"Before the 20th century, the Scots had a fairly standard pattern of naming children, which may give clues to the names of grandparents:

Eldest son was named after the paternal grandfather

2nd son was named after the maternal grandfather

3rd son was named after the father

Eldest daughter was named after the maternal grandmother

2nd daughter was named after the paternal grandmother

3rd daughter was named after the mother

It was also quite common to create girls' names by adding a or ina to a man's name, e.g. Jacoba, Jamesina, which in some cases seems to have been done when there weren't enough sons in the family to commemorate the male relatives"

I don't know if this is of any use to anyone, but thought that I'd put it just in case .

Best wishes,
Sgt Tollers

[Crowhunt]

Yes! I was aware and it did come in very handy with one of my families! I wish ALL my families did it!
I also wish that my families used more "family names" as middle names. That was also very helpful in identifying a family as part of my line.

[Douglas P]

Hi girls,

I recently came across the following page tucked away on the internet. It lists the typical naming pattern for the first ten sons & first ten daughters:

http://www.halmyre.abel.co.uk/Family/naming.htm

It still surprises me how many children some people had in those days. My grandmother was one of 13. Another ancestor didn't marry until he was 35 and still had 9 children.

I've found middle names can be useful to trace other records for a person but I haven't always found them helpful with predicting other family names for their ancestry. I have two ancestors that I'm told acquired their middle names from the Ministers they were baptised by.

Douglas.

[pollywolly]

really interesting.  i have family members called hughina, robina and wilma all of which come from the male side of there family and interesting to know its usually because the parents ran out of sons to name so adapted the names for girls.

[Clare Fowler]

Hi there,

Sometimes the -ina ending was just because families had picked a boy's name and didn't want to change it, or wanted to name the daughter after a male relative.  A more extreme version of this is just given the daughter a boy's name regardless. My grandmother's best friend while growing up was a girl called Gordon!   

Cheers,
Clare

[ibi]

If anyone can show me a family where the 4th to 14th names are as on that list, I'll happily eat my hat, or anyone else's for that matter! 

It's very rare to come across any set pattern beyond the 3rd son and daughter.

The much more frequent pattern involves the 3rd son being named after the father, and 3rd daughter after the mother.

One quite frequent usage is 4th, 5th etc., sons after paternal and maternal uncles, sometimes starting with the eldest such; and similarly for 4th, 5th, etc., daughters.

http://www.halmyre.abel.co.uk/Family/naming.htm is correct in the sense that it's not unusual to find parents' grandparents' names and even g-grandparents' names being used, but not in any set order that I'm aware of.

In any case, given the relatively small pool of given names in use in the 19th century and earlier, the chances are that this would only lead to repeats!

ibi

[carol sea]

Things get even more confusing when parents sadly lost a child in infancy after registering them. Often they would call their next born child by the same name and given that in those days it was not that unusual for two babies to be born in the same year....nightmare time for the genealogist! Why do we do this???

Carol

[ibi]

Carol

Practice varied from family to family, and area to area.

In some families the name of a child who had died in infancy was never ever re-used, - bad luck to do so !!

While in other families, the name was re-used, - I've had experience of 4 children of the same name where it can be shown that the first three died in infancy as opposed to it being the not unknown case of the name being repeated in terms of the traditional Scottish naming pattern ............

ibi

[apanderson]

Hi all,

(Hopefully) I've attached a photo of a head stone which shows 2 x Johns and 2 x James's - it seems this family were determined to use these names as no sooner had one child died than they used it again.

The 'tradition' as ibi said, comes in handy now and again but isn't always the case.

On my wanderings in various graveyards and cemeteries I've come across a few women bearing the names of Stuart and Nicholas.

There have been a few more instances when I've had to do a double take as what I originally thought was a man had in fact been a woman. Offhand I can't remember what these were but when I find them, I'll add another post.

Anne