If the name fits

There are many different ways in which our given names are decided. Some prospective parents spend months poring over books and magazine articles devoted to anthroponomy. Others wait for inspiration to strike after the birth: "As soon as I held her for the first time, I just knew she was a Marie".

The decision-making method of most interest to family historians is the practice of following a traditional naming pattern: "This is my fourth son, so he is named for my eldest brother". If you are researching a family who adopt this method and an expected name is "missing" from your search results, then you have a good idea of whom you are looking for.

The best known of these patterns are found in thousands of families within a particular culture now spread across the globe. Sometimes you may detect a pattern with limited applicability that proves equally useful in guiding your research.

Arthur Chandler, gamekeeper of Beckenham in Kent, and his wife Jane Taylor had a large family (at least by modern standards). Some online trees listed as many as 12 children for the couple. I was able to account for five of them in the civil registrations of birth and they were confirmed by the details of the 1851 Census. Pre-1837 baptismal records added four more documented children.

As I contemplated the list of known children and those yet to be found, a pattern in the names suddenly became glaringly apparent. Arthur and Jane had named their children Arthur, Asenath, Alfred, Andrew, Amelia, Antoinette, Amy, Angelina and Alice.

Might this explain my inability to find evidence for their purported siblings Joseph, Caroline and Bob?

It was a straight-forward task to establish that the births supposed to have occurred in 1851 (Caroline) and 1853 (Bob) did not involve Jane Chandler (or take place anywhere in England, for that matter). Perhaps these were added to the family by international "cuckoo" researchers dropping their ancestor into the nest of any UK family of the same name to establish their immigrant origins - a type of retrospective informal adoption?

The status of Joseph is more challenging. In the 1841 Census he is listed after Arthur and Janet with the surname "do", but without any indication of a family relationship (a feature not introduced until 1851). His stated age (15) would mean that he was born some years before the marriage of his putative "parents". Might he be an ex-nuptial child of Jane or a pre-nuptial child of the couple who was named by Jane's parents (and so missed receiving an A-name from Arthur)? On the other hand, Joseph might be a nephew or cousin of Arthur residing with them at the time of the census. I said that a naming pattern could guide your research not find all the answers!

In case you are wondering how the children felt about their names; Arthur junior had thirteen children (born in Surrey and then in New South Wales) and he named them Arthur, Amos, Alma, Andrew, Abraham ... you see the pattern. Young Alice (who came to Queensland) was a rebel with a not a single A-name among her five children despite (or perhaps, because of) the fact that their French father Gustave Collin also had the names Antoine and Alexandre.

Great or Grand

When I was a small boy, I used the term Aunt when speaking to, or about, my mother's sister and my father's mother's sisters and several other ladies (apparently unrelated to me but) well known to my parents.

I assumed it was another one of those terms of respect for adults that you learned to use through practice and occasional reproof.

The idea that there might be formal rules for allocating this honorific across generations simply did not occur to me. So when I had children, they referred to my (actual biologically-related) aunt as their aunt.

We did not even consider the use of any generation-indicating prefix.

Thirty years on, my son's children know that they have many aunts including my daughter, my sister and my mother's sister. As a genealogist, that now seems just a little untidy and potentially confusing. So the recent article by Judy G Russell on the apparent inconsistency in referring to a pair of sisters as grandmother but great aunt struck a chord.

I happened to mention this to the 2xgreat aunt of my grandchildren (that is, my aunt). She had no particular opinion on the relative genealogical efficiency of the choice, but did observe wistfully that it might have been nice to be called "grandaunt".

What a shame that this conversation came more than thirty years too late. What may seem to be mere technical terms can carry surprising personal significance within families.

I need to remember to assure Aunt Joan that whatever we call her, she has done (and continues to do) a GRAND job.

Money well spent

We know that money cannot buy happiness but, judiciously applied to the purchase of just the right certificate, it can dispel a whole lot of family history gloom.

When our 2xgreat grand grandmother Agnes Burton died in Queensland in 1937, her parents were recorded as John Cameron and Agnes Anderson.

There was no reason to doubt this information since Agnes had at least four adult daughters living in close proximity who would have collaborated on the task of registering her death.

Confidence in the veracity of these claims has been shaken by an extended period of trawling through transcriptions of Scottish censuses without locating one plausible candidate for this Cameron household. There was just one course of action left. I hesitantly opened my (digital) purse and paid ScotlandsPeople to view the record of the marriage of Agnes to Andrew Burton. This revealed the bride's parents to be John Cameron and Sarah Anderson!

Naturally, locating the relevant census records took a matter of moments with the correct names. And then the implications of the new information began to flow. The full name of Aunt Sally (Sarah Anderson Cameron Burton) now made perfect sense and reminded me not to forget the naming convention when facing a Scots brick wall. Was this further indirect evidence that Sally's younger sisters may not have known their grandmother? Did Agnes Cox simply assume that, because her name was Agnes and her mother was Agnes, her grandmother was also?

Family historians need a healthy streak of scepticism. We must remember that it is most important to bring it into play precisely when there seems "no reason to doubt". Trust no-one and examine the documents. It might be £1.20 well spent.

A bunch of roses by any other name

One of the perennial topics debated when family historians gather is How do you distinguish among family members with the same name?.

There are lots of ways to approach the problem but sometimes you encounter a situation where you think that barcoding might be appropriate.

When I began to search for our 2xgreat grandmother, I knew that her maiden name was Jane DAVIES and the family came from north Wales. She turned up quickly in the census and everything tallied but the date of birth. I knew Nan was old but she could not have been that old.

It turned out that I had not found our 2xgreat grandmother at all, but our 3xgreat grandmother whose maiden name was also Jane DAVIES before she married John DAVIES.

I was prepared to keep mother and daughter separate in my head, but my concern grew when I encountered another John and Jane Davies of similar age in the same place. I realise that there are lots of very common names in Wales, but the parallels between these couples were worrying.

It was small relief to learn that Jane (the mother) had a brother John who had married a woman called Jane. He probably thought nothing of it, since their brother Joseph had also taken a wife called Jane. And young Sarah's husband was John as well(mercifully, not Davies).

Add a couple more Johns in the next generation (cousins of our Jane the younger) and it begins to look like a naming nightmare.

Of course, when the extended family gathered, the issue probably never arose. Almost all those present would have had another name by which they were usually known to the others. Those unique nicknames would have avoided any confusion. What a shame they neglected to pass them down for the benefit of long suffering family historians in centuries to come.

What's in a name?

I have always referred to our 4xgreat grandmother as Susannah with an "h" because that was the name under which I first encountered her when studying census returns. On the other hand, her baptismal record shows that on that day in 1816 she was recorded as Susanna.

This inevitably leads to the question (much loved by genealogists) What was her real name?

It is important to recognise that Civil Registration of births, marriages and deaths started on 1 July 1837 in England and Wales. So there is no legal basis for preferring one form over another as the official name.

We might argue that the name ordinarily used by the person is in fact her "real name" for all practical purposes and that was (unconsciously) my basis for taking the form used in the census return, but there is a difficulty.

The record of the marriage of Susannah in 1835 shows that she, her husband and her mother all "made their mark" as a form of signature. Since they were unable to write their own names, they were unlikely to be able to recognise and correct an "error" made by a literate person. Almost certainly, the records of Susanna(h)'s name were all made by others

A study of the relative frequency of the two forms in printed language suggests that the with-h variant was briefly the more popular a couple of decades before our 4xgreat grandmother's birth but has been declining ever since. Why then would educated people consistently prefer the "older" version?

I suspect that the answer lies in the role of the church. A literate man in North Wales in the mid-nineteenth century would have been very familiar with his Bible and would know of the role of Susannah (with Joanna and Mary Magdalene) in the Gospel of Luke. Anyone hearing the name would immediately bring to mind the New Testament spelling. Everyone, that is, except the Rev E Roberts on the day of the baptism. Perhaps he was one of those modern vicars.

There is one other reason for believing that Susannah's name should be spelled in that way. Although their parents were illiterate, the Davies children could read and write. Two of them (Joseph and Sarah) gave daughters the name of their grandmother. Both Susannah Davies (b 1867) and Susannah Hollingsworth (b 1876) are with-h, so I reckon that their granny was too!

Can you spell that?

In the course of Friday's (excellent) seminar on Shipping Records, discussion turned to the many and varied versions of ships' names that may be found. The Rajahgopaul was cited as one example of a name that is often mangled by family historians.

This is a vessel close to my heart because it was the birthplace of Catherine Corry. So I was interested to find the definitive answer to how it should be named.

A Google search [rajahgopaul] produces an immediate suggestion that I may have it wrong; followed by an array of "hits" on different spelling forms.

Employing the time-honoured maxim that he who agrees with me must be correct, I went to the New South Wales State Records result first.

There I found that the image of the passenger list includes (in a beautiful copperplate hand) yet another spelling.

So the name could be one word (with two internal variants) or two capitalised words (with or without a hyphen)!

When you need a definitive ruling, you should seek an authoritative source and what could be more authoritative in the maritime field than Lloyd's Register, available for search through Google Books.

The 1855 edition includes our vessel and the issue is resolved — one word, with a "u".

Now to confirm that fact by referring to the 1860 edition of Lloyd's (because you cannot have too many supporting references).

And the conclusion? The ways in which the names of ships are recorded are no more (or less) reliable than those of the names of the people and places we seek out.

Take care that you consider all the obvious variations (and even some not so obvious). The obituary of Mrs Maria Holgate (eldest sister of Catherine Corry) in The Central Queensland Herald of 5 October 1933 reported that she had "come to Australia with her parents in the ship, Rajah de Paul".

How many of us are there?

As you turn back from researching a blind alley after finding that yet another person is not the ancestor you are seeking, you might be inclined to say "Well at least we don't have any Smiths in our tree." Which prompts the question How common are the surnames of our family?

There are a number of websites that enable you to compare the occurrence of a particular name across countries and (in some places) within a single country. The World Names Profiler enabled me to look for BURTONS across the world and within the United Kingdom.

This site reports a measure of FPM (frequency per million people)and other mapping tools provide similar. But it is rare to find one that exposes the underlying raw data.

For the United States, FindTheData does just that, by drawing upon the Social Security Administration database. At first glance, you appear to be limited to searching on one name at a time. However, the "Compare" button in the results allows you to collect the data on up to ten names and view them as a table or in various charts.

With a little copying and pasting into a spreadsheet, I was able to extract data on each of the 30 unique surnames that occur in 6 generations of our tree and create a column chart showing how many US citizens share them with us.

While the ANDERSON name clearly dominates, there are 11 more popular surnames in the database. (For every Anderson, you can find 30 American Smiths. "Well at least we don't have any Smiths ... )

Considering our geographical origins, we find a top ten made up of:

• a Scottish group Anderson[1] Cameron[6]
• an English group Cook [2] Lloyd [4] Wilkins [5]
• an Irish group Burton [3] McAllister [10]
• a German group Kuhn [8] Cramer [9]
• and one Welsh name Davies [7]

Restricting the data to the 8 surnames found in 4 recent generations, the chart looks like this.

I was surprised that there is not a single entry for SUDDABY in the US database. Hidden in the scale of the first chart is the fact that there are no MEDWELL, HEATHWOOD or BARGH either.

On the other hand, the raw numbers for even the low frequency names are huge. More than 9000 NOYES would create quite a few blind alleys to explore. In moments of frustration, perhaps we should say "Well at least we aren't working on the USA."

The ready availability of all these American data highlights the apparent difficulty of obtaining comparable information on surname frequency in Australia. The site British Surnames has a list of the 100 Top Australian Surnames that suggests raw data may be able to be extracted by someone sufficiently determined. But that may have to be a task for another day.

Who was Catherine Corry?

When I was a small boy, I thought that (great) Aunty Corry had a very strange name. I said so to my grandmother, who told me that Corry was part of her name too; and that of Aunty Vi; and Uncle Tommy and even Uncle Henry. Who was the woman with such an influence that five of her grandchildren were given her name?

I have previously written about our 3xgreat grandmother Catherine CORRY having been born at sea on 9 September 1852 as the SS Rajahgopaul neared the (then) colony of New South Wales.

But the connection between that birth and the person we know to be our ancestor is by no means straight-forward.

We know that Catherine married Henry SUDDABY in Bundaberg on 21 March 1876. Their first child, Thomas Henry, was born at Cooranga Creek in the District of Darling Downs North, on New Years Day 1877. It was five weeks before Henry travelled into Dalby to register the birth. On the form he indicated that Catherine was 26 years old and had been born at Margathy in County Armagh, Ireland.

Catherine had a second child, William, on 26 April 1878 and she died seven days later (3 May). William lived for just two weeks after his mother's death (d 15 May 1878). The registration of Catherine's death lists her parents as James CURRIE and Mary O'DONNELL.

There is no record of either of these "parents" in Australia. Nor is there any record of migration by Catherine from Co Armagh either alone or as part of a family. I have been unable to locate any place in Armagh, or elsewhere in Ireland, with a name resembling Margathy. The lives of the family from the Rajahgopaul, on the other hand, are well documented and consistent.

All of the apparently incorrect information came from Henry Suddaby. You might argue that a man who had lost a young wife and been left with a toddler and a (dying) baby had every excuse for being an unreliable witness in May 1878; but that leaves the February 1877 errors to be explained.

I conclude either that Henry was unaware of his wife's family and origins, or that he deliberately concealed them.

Was Catherine estranged from her family? Had she kept the truth from her husband; or did he know it and supported her by keeping a secret beyond the grave?

One possible explanation is that the Catherine born on the Rajahgopaul was the child of Anthony CORRY and Catherine KENNY of Killmurray, Co Clare. Like her sisters Maria and Honora, she was almost certainly Roman Catholic.

Henry SUDDABY (and his brother John, who accompanied him to Australia) had been christened in the Church of England Parish of Eastrington, Yorkshire.

Whatever the truth, such matters were of no interest to little Thomas Henry SUDDABY. Left without a mother at eighteen months of age, he then lost his father three days after his fifth birthday. Tom must have had precious little to remember either of his parents as he grew up, but he held onto a name — Catherine CORRY.

Tom's first child with Jane DAVIES in 1897 was named Olive May. After that, he gave each of five children, boy or girl, the same second name — Corry. Today, I don't think that is strange at all.

Peering into clouds

I took a break from the rigours of interpreting eighteenth century record-keeping and caught up on some of Maria Northcote's Genies DownUnder podcasts. The March episode on using images included the suggestion to use Wordle to present family names in the form of a word cloud.

I collapsed a seven-generation ancestor tree into a list of surnames weighted by the frequency with which they occur. When I fed the list to Wordle and selected a font and colour scheme to suit my personality, this was the result:

I probably should not be surprised at the power of an image to convey new information. Nevertheless, the pictorial representation did give me pause to think. How can Davies be so prominent when there have been none for several generations. Had I made an error in the name count? Never under-estimate a Welsh influence. A quick check confirmed that young Jane had no fewer than three grandparents born Davies (and the fourth is still uncertain!)

Less obvious but equally significant is the prominent "male" line actually headed by an unmarried mother. How easily that name could have been much less obvious.

Hidden entirely in the image but highlighted on my To-Do list is the fact that there are still 25 unknown in the seven-generation tree. Incentive enough to get back to the records.

What's in a name?

On May 5 1780, James LOUDEN married Christian McGARNIE in the parish of Whitekirk and Tynninghame. A fortnight later, on 19 May 1780, James LOTHIAN married Christian BEGARNEY in the parish church of Dunbar.

The two villages are described as being an eight-minute drive (or in 1780, a one-hour walk) apart.

Is this an amazing coincidence or the same couple being married twice, and if so why?

• I have previously found that Christian McGarnie was baptised Christian BELGARNIE and that her "correct" maiden name was recorded at the christening of some of her later children with James.
• I have found no other record of Christian BEGARNEY.
• There was a child of Christian BALGONIE and James LOTHIAN christened Janet in Dunbar on 30 December 1780, apparently an only child.
• Christian and James of Whitekirk had seven children between 1783 and 1796; none were called Janet, although that was the name of Christian's mother and had been given to two of her sisters.

The temptation to declare that these two families are one and the same is almost overwhelming. But why were there two kirk weddings?