There are certain names that just make you wonder. How could
anyone have looked at that tiny newborn and decided to label them with some
tongue twister or pompous mouthful?
Some names are handed down through generations. This can be
a bane for many a genealogist. Which generation did the immigrant James belong
to anyway? Was it the son or the father or maybe even the grandfather? It can
also lead to very dated names being given to modern day children. Not great on
your average school playground.
But families who reuse the same birth names over generations
can be helpful in genealogical research. Traditions like the Scottish naming
pattern can be useful in identifying family connections but that pattern seems
to have been discarded a few generations ago. Maybe that changed because there were fewer
kids to name or because families no longer stayed in traditional communities.
My own birth family looked back to previous generations to
chose names for their progeny. In my case, I was named after my great aunt. I
was saddled with the name Margaret. I have always struggled to understand that because
I called my great aunt, Auntie Peg. Personally, I don’t think she liked the
name Margaret either. The women in my mother’s family seem to have had a love hate
relationship with the labels they were given. My own mother went by her middle name but it
was her mother who went to the greatest extremes.
My
grandfather, Harold Chambers, and his wife, the once named Katie May
