Middle name rant

[Terri]

I need to have a small rant about "relevant" middle names - the ones you know must mean something, but you can't figure out why.

I have generations of Jenner as a middle name in one family - who the heck was Jenner??

Then there's Hullis. The name appears 50 years earlier in the same village, but that's it.

And Augustus. My gg grandfather "adopted" this as a middle name and it's passed down through the family since. Augustus, whoever he was, obviously had a profound influence on gg granddad.

There's lots more - odd, quirky or plain ordinary surnames dropped into the names of one child or more without rhyme or reason. :mad:

[kiterunner]

My Bristow 2xg-grandparents named their eldest son John Frederick Wyllie Bristow, and the middle name Wylie or Wyllie was then carried on down the generations, but I have no idea where it came from. I haven't come across the name in tracing them back or sideways.

[ElizabethHerts]

My 2x-great-grandparents John and Fanny Ada Quintrell had eight children.

Fanny Eddy - Eddy was the surname (Cornish) of the husband of a cousin!
John Daddow - Daddow was the maiden name of the father's mother
Frank Emery - Emery was the surname of the husband of the mother's sister
Fred Wood - Wood was the mother's maiden name
Ada - my great-grandmother, who was the only one without a second name. (Why?)
Louisa Hubbert - still a mystery who the Hubbert was for
Mary Dickens - I think possibly after Charles Dickens, who was important in the Portsmouth area
Tom Bromley - not sure about this one either!

[Lindsay]

My 4xg-grandfather, a baker who moved to London in his 20s, gave one of his sons the middle name Stourton, which was then passed down the generations. Eventually I discovered a Mr Stourton in the ancestral village who was also a baker, so I'm guessing there was some sort of connection.

My Devon branch gave some of their children the surnames of recently married aunts as middle names, which was a great help in confirming I had the right people!

[Olde Crone]

I've told this before but it still makes me snigger.

My father, grandfather and great grandfather all had the middle name Seymour and my grandfather used it as his professional name (he was an opera singer for a few years). Grandmother said "we are related to THE Seymours, you know". Poor Jane Seymour but how thrilling! Unfortunately no matter how far back I went, I could find no connection between the Holdens and THE Seymours or any other Seymour either.

Browsing idly through the back pages of a chapel record I came upon my great grandfather's membership of the congregational church which was a sort of adult baptism. His Sponsor was Seymour Mead, grocer of Lancashire hahaha! As this was the first time ggf used the middle name Seymour, the coincidence is just too great. Turns out Seymour Mead was a great uncle by marriage and I suspect it was he who was responsible for all three brothers being apprenticed to a grocer, which was another mystery solved!

OC

[KiwiChris]

My rant would be the ones who have a really unusual middle name at baptism, and thereafter are only ever known by their very common first and last name.

[Terri]

I had one fella with Heneage as a middle name. The only connection I could find - they lived on Heneage Street, Birmingham when he was born. Surely that has to be a coincidence.

But these days, we have Brooklyn Beckham, etc etc .............

[Jenoco]

Mine is my 4x gg Egerton Dansie Coleman Philbrick (I've mentioned him before). Egerton is after his stepfather but I've no idea where the other two names came from and he is the only one of six sons who warrants more than one name.

[HarrysMum]

My Huband lot.....

William and Agnes (nee Horswill)

Sarah Tracy 1819-1864 Was Tracy a Christian name in 1819?
John 1828-1831
John Scoble 1831-1831 Scoble was a family surname
John James 1832-1889 (The one John who finally lived to adulthood)
William Henry Scoble 1822-1823
William Henry Morgan 1824-1905 The only Morgan anywhere within cooee is the BUTCHER????

So.....Morgan just pops up and I'm still not sure about Tracy either.

[rainbowdragon]

I solved a similar mystery last year. My 8th great uncle James Tickle of Droitwich named one of his daughters Avis Norris Tickle. This was an irritating mystery for more than 30 years, since back when my mother was still interested in genealogy.

I assumed that there was likely some connection to someone with the Norris surname in Worcestershire (there was a prominant Norris family in Droitwich), so I spent some money getting wills of that family.

Last year I discovered the existance of James’ maternal aunt Avis Hanley who married Thomas Norris in London. :D

[HarrysMum]

I've got Norris as a second name for my gg grandmother. Cannot find where it came from.

[Durham Lady]

For years I was told my paternal grandmother's maiden surname was Mitchell and that was why my father's brother Joseph was given the name Mitchell as a second name. None of my father's siblings had a full birth certificate so none knew what their mother's maiden name had been.
When I bought a full copy of my father's birth certificate grandma's surname was Jobes.
I later found my grandfather's youngest sister had married a Joseph Mitchell and along with grandfather's other siblings they had emigrated to the USA.

[Phoenix]

Sib's middle name commemorates a former mayor of Portsmouth: a distant relative and the only family member to achieve fame.
Unfortunately, the lustre was so lacking that Dad got the name wrong:o
Generations later, people may be puzzling over that middle name:D

[Nell]

Middle names, like first names, can be helpful, but sometimes they are not used or are misrecorded.

I made an error with someone in my tree, recorded at birth witha middle name as E. I wrongly assumed it was Emmets, a common male middle name in this branch of the family, going back to a gt gt x lots grandmother's maiden name. But it turns out he was named after his own mother's maiden name, Elsbury. Except that wasn't her maiden name - it was Aylesbury, but transmuted to Elsbury when she moved to London from Somerset!

[ElizabethHerts]

One of my third cousins has been in contact with me and he is descended from Louisa Hubbert Quintrell.

He had some items belonging to his grandmother and there was a letter in 1857 from a Louisa Hubbert to my great-great-grandfather offering condolences on the death of her dear friend Jane Wood, John's mother-in-law.

I did some sleuthing and have discovered that Louisa Ann Ellis married Nathaniel Hubbert by licence at Finsbury in 1832. They settled in Portsea and Nathaniel was a draper (as was Jane Wood and her husband Newbourn Wood).

Nathaniel Hubbert came from Lincolnshire, as did Newbourn Wood.

When John and Fanny Quintrell's sixth child was born in 1868, they named her Louisa Hubbert Quintrell after Fanny's mother's great friend. Louisa Ann Hubbert died in 1876 aged 76. She was born in Devon. She had a sad life inasmuch as she lost a lot of children in infancy and her husband died in 1844.

My third cousin has a lot of interesting stuff, including two photos of miniatures labelled "Mr and Mrs Smith" who we believe could be the parents of Jane Smith who married Newbourn Wood. The fashions look about right.

[marquette]

Several of our family were given the middle name of Brent, which we discovered was also the name of Thomas Brent, the blacksmith who lived and worked with my 3xg grandfather George Collis and his sons. Later, I discovered that the property at Wards Cross, Hurst, was left to George and his wife by HER maternal Aunt, Elizabeth Trumplett.

However, no mystery with the Dawsons and the Christies and their associated families - they used each other's surnames, so we end up with John Christie Dawson and John Dawson Christie, Hugh Whitmore Christie, Herbert Whitmore Dawson, George Christie Dawson, Joseph Hammett Dawson, Mary Ann Hammett Sturmy and Walter Christie Cooper.

[vita]

I've got two middle names appearing in my family - Hughes & Hawke, both a mystery

as to their origins. The latter was my grandfather, so I was hopeful about tracing that

as it wasn't too far back, but no luck so far.

[Macbev]

OH's Gould family has Wentworth and Husey persisting down through the generations in England, Australia and USA. No mystery, though I consider them to be odd names. The Goulds, who appear in the Heralds' Visitations of Dorset, intermarried with V.I.P families (Wentworths and Husseys/Huseys) and obviously made sure no one would ever forget it.
Fortunately, OH is related through his mother and was spared these names. Instead, we are saddled with Scottish expectations .......Archibalds and Johns