Family tradition of naming a member of the family after the mother or the place they came from>

Question

My question is a general one. Has anyone notice that most families tend to name at least one of their children their mothers last name or the place where there are from? I have several ancestors that did just that take my distant cousin middle name Carteret Carter. There is a place in North Carolina where the family came from name Carteret. I found that it has helped in many ways in tracking ones family here is the United States or in Europe. I like that custom.

Comments

Yes gee... My brother's middle name is my mother's maiden name. My sons middle name is my grandmother's maiden name. There are several generations using the middle name Milner which was the maiden name of 4x great grandmother. This is the southern side of my family (except me), but the southern side of the family was a major influence in my naming patterns. I would have covered lots of ancestors if I'd had more children.

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My middle name (Keay) is my mother's maiden name. I didn't appreciate it as a kid.

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That is interesting and the name Milner is a form of Miller I believe. However where does Keay come from? sounds kind of like  Celtic.

Answer 1

It's an old Southern tradition to give a child their mother's maiden name as a given name. However! Watch out! Just because a surname appears as a given or middle name does not always mean that's the surname of a grandmother or great-grandmother. Sometimes children would be named after in-laws. One of my several times great-grandfathers was named William Hence Higginbotham -- after an uncle who had married into the family.

Comments

Thanks for the answers. I thought it was a great custom.

Answer 2

I do not think that most families would have named their children after the place where they were born. Examples of this tend to be a bit on the rare side. I have noted, on a few occasions, a tradition that seafaring families, of the captains, who traveled together, often named their children " Seaborn, if born at sea ", as a middle name, or names like " Azore " if the ship was docked in the Azores at the time of birth, etc, etc.... the place name was usually allocated as a middle name.

Comments

George there is a place in North Carolina where most of my family is from at this time. Most of them did name their children from their place of birth, mother's or other relatives name to honor them. I even found where one branch of a family honored a young one that passed on early in life by giving a sibling the same name.
Thanks for your answer George. I believe I will look into this might make fine reading later in life .

Answer 3

Hi,

in one of my family branches there was a tradition till the end of the 18th century to call a child Elmerhus. The name is coming from the noble family von Elmeringhausen. They made a contract with the family von Haxterhausen, that after the extinction of one house the other one should enherited all the land and therefore has to name a child after the other family. Well, the house of von Elmeringhausen was the one that got extinct. Another ancestors is named Niggehus, after the hometown of his mother, who was from the city of Neuhaus, near Paderborn.

Comments

That is a good way to make sure that the name passes on if not the genes. Thanks Bjorn for this information. If you do not mind I would like to print this you never know I might write that book yet.

Answer 4

I have found many profiles from the 1800s era that named the first son
with either the first or middle name that reflected the mother's maiden name.  Even a few daughters were named after the grandmothers maiden name as a middle name, but not a very common practice.

Comments

Beulah, it was common practice until like I mention in another comment until my greatgrand mothers time. Thanks for the  comment

Answer 5

There are lots of those in my Jewett line ... mostly an ancestor's last name used as a middle name.

Also, done recently as my niece has both of her grandmother's first names as her first and middle names.  My daughter's in-law side does the middle name thing but primarily using someone's first name as a middle name.

Comments

The tradition is carried on

Answer 6

My sense is that is sometimes a locally leader gets places and babies named after him.  So in your example the Carteret name could reflect a lineal relationship to a Mr Famous Carteret or simply an homage to his memory.

Comments

There is a place in North Carolina named Carteret. I believe it towards the East side. At least in the old maps I looked at. Another place to visit in this hobby if mine.  Heritage, graveyards, and old towns. Thanks for your comment E. Compton.

Answer 7

Interesting question.  This is something that came up extensively in my research of the Westons of Cranbrook and Tenterden and related families in Kent during the 18th century, so I thought I'd take take a more detailed look at it this morning.  I'm not sure how far these practices are influenced by geography, chronology or status, so I've tried to include information on all three.

The furthest back that I can trace my paternal line is to farmers in Mayfield in East Sussex from about 1425.  They used Weston as a surname, did not use middle names and had very standard first names, usually William, Thomas and John.  When the parish registers at Mayfield commenced in 1570, different individuals in the parish who shared the same forename and surname were differentiated by giving a parent's forename, an indication of age, or the location where they were living.  Sometimes a combination of all three was used e.g. "little John Weston the sonne of John Weston of Sharndean".  Some 9% of the parish registry entries are concerned with the many Weston families in the neighbourhood! The most propertied of them use the term "yeoman" to describe themselves.

The first unusual forename is Mersham Weston in 1602.  Mersham is the name of a village in East Kent, a surprising 30 miles from Mayfield,

In the mid-seventeenth century, one branch of the family had moved the much shorter distance to the booming woollen broadcloth producing town of Cranbrook, in west Kent.  Heads of the family started to call themselves "clotheir" from 1668, then, gradually, from 1698 onward "gentleman".

In 1750, a third son was given his grandmother's maiden name of "Stringer" as a forename.  Without any further intermarriage with the Stringer family, Stringer became an occasional family name, being last deployed in 1896.

The first use of a middle name was in 1770 when Elizabeth Hyland Weston was given the maiden name of her maternal grandmother's mother.  At the end of the eighteenth century, her branch of the family moved to Tenterden, becoming gentleman sheep farmers and civic leaders (eleven times mayors or the town).  Of Elizabeth's seventeen nieces and nephews with the Weston surname, nine had middle names and only two of those were not the surname of a related family.

Thereafter, maiden names got perpetuated as middle names within the family.  The frequency of use may have corresponded to the importance of the connected family.  Most tellingly, in 1784 John Tempest Weston was given his maternal grandmother's maiden name.  The Tempests are one of England's very ancient aristocratic families and the Westons carry on celebrating the connection by occasionally using that name right up to the current day.  Sometimes the use of the name is according to a formula: in my own branch of the family, the eldest boy in each generation since 1810 has had a middle name of Pix.  Sometimes the name is used for all the children.  I don't have an example of a "double barrelled" surname (nowadays so customary) using the name Weston, but Catherine Weston married a Charles Henry Rogers Harrison in 1845, and some of their children began to hyphenate his last two names as an indivisible unit from then on.

Comments

Thank you Chris  for such an in-depth analysis of family names. When, where and how they were used. If you don't  mind I am going to print this answer and when I find the time I would also like to do a similar investigation into our family tree. I do find it interesting on the why, who, what, and where this was done. Most important why it is diminishing. Wand

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Yes, please do!  I'd be interested to hear what you find.  I made a mistake lining up the different generations when counting up the initial uses of middle names.  I've now edited the main answer to correct that.

Answer 8

A general answer for a general question: While naming patterns like you describe may have been popular at some time in some area they stop being significant when compared to the rest of the world.