17
The name is Agnes.
You can compare each of the letters to those shown in this BYU Script Tutorial for German handwriting.
I extracted the relevant letters from the alphabet image on that site, and put them together in one image. I've included your image below for easy comparison.
11
I suspect that your Martha and Pattie are the same people.
It is known for nicknames / pet names to be used on the British census - not as a matter of course, but it's not unknown.
The "What's In a Name" web-site has an entry for Pattie indicating that it can be used as a pet-name for Martha. It suggests that "areas of the southern United States, pre-1776, ...
7
According to the Oxford Dictionary of First Names:
Ferdinand ♂
From a Spanish name, originally Ferdinando (now Hernán), which is of
Germanic (Visigothic) origin, derived from farð ‘journey’ (or possibly
an altered form of frið ‘peace’) + nand ‘ready, prepared’. This was a
traditional name in the royal families of Spain from an early date. It
...
6
It's very common for at least one child to have the mother's maiden name as a middle - it's a way of preserving a name that might otherwise be lost.
I can't see I've ever seen a case where quite so many children have been given their mother's maiden name as a middle name before though!
It can certainly be very useful in confirming that you've got the right ...
6
Oooh, I like this question. And I have data to contribute!
This data set is from the Israel Genealogy Research Association's "All Israel Database" (http://genealogy.org.il/AID/index.php) which, as of August 2015, covers over 576,000 records that were collected in, or chiefly about, the land of Israel in its Ottoman period, British Mandate period, and ...
6
For an 'out of the box' answer -- one of the more interesting blog posts I've come across recently is from Kenneth Marks' site The Ancestor Hunt where he offers a series of lessons on how to do newspaper research, including 8 Ways to Overcome OCR Errors when Searching Newspapers.
Unlike Soundex, he focuses on substituting letters which have the same shapes ...
6
I also found it useful to have this PDF around for comparing the letters. The benefit being you can zoom it in quite a bit:
https://feefhs.org/sites/default/files/guide/german-gothic.pdf
Once you get an initial idea about what the letters are likely to be you can use the following tool to generate a sample which you can check against:
http://altdeutsche-...
5
I get both cynical and concerned about naming patterns. Concerned in case people use naming patterns to prove genealogy rather than genealogy to prove naming patterns. Cynical because my great grandfather was a Scot (Dundee but with ancestry coming from the edge of the Highlands in the Tay Valley) and in all the related families from north of the Border, I ...
5
I'm surprised no-one seems to have mentioned using wildcards. Provided the search engine of the site you are using will support it (and Ancestry is pretty limited in this regard), putting in "Harp*" will deal with the most obvious variant endings and you can vary the position of the asterisk and the number of letters to what suits.
I've had a lot of ...
4
I have 25 years of extensive research on the Greiner family. My largest book is 50,000 Greiners of the same blood line and approximately 50 other smaller books which have yet to be connected to the master file.
The hyphenated name has been studied numerous times and there are various reasons for its use by the family. There were so many with the same ...
4
Miriam Zilli Grafer has left on-line trees at WorldConnect and Geneanet, among other sites. [Other links can easily be found by googling her name]. These Greiners seem to be based initially in Schwaben and primarily in Thüringen. Although there are sources listed, most appear to be secondary publications. It is not clear if any primary resources include the ...
4
Biblical names may not necessarily signify non-conformist affiliations. There are certainly cases, even before non-conformism was around, where Biblical names more likely signified stronger than average (conventional) religious convictions.
For example, one Abraham Dewce moved from elsewhere (possibly Wolverhampton) to take up duties as vicar of Abdon, ...
4
Hmm - I think the answer might be "It seemed like a good idea at the time" more often than we care to imagine. My Pickstock families from mid-Cheshire in the 1800s seem to like to use more unusual names. They were, so far as I can see, Methodists when I've been able to confirm their faith, but for interest, my 4G GF named his children thus:
James
Martha
...
4
My ancestor ROBERT OSMENT born 1742 married Mary Gloipen from Yealmpton 12 Jan 1765.
ROBERT's daughter was CAROLINE JANE OSMENT. She moved to London and married JOHN BEARD. Some of the children had the OSMENT middle name.
Returning to ROBERT His parents were Robert and Eliza.
ROBERT OSMENT father of Robert, was born in 1703 and baptised on 8 March, ...
4
I have found Scottish naming patterns to be a useful starting point in researching my ancestors in early North America - not proof, but a starting point for a line of inquiry in the absence of hard evidence. A kind of circumstantial evidence, it can help to create a working hypothesis, or support a conclusion in combination with a preponderance of other ...
3
None of these answers will find all the surname variants and deviants. Soundex and other phonetic algorithms will find some, wildcards will find most.
The only way that is possible to locate all spelling alternatives is to leave the surname field blank. Fill in other fields instead (as few as possible) such as first name, place, or date, to narrow down the ...
3
The suffix "Junior" could have been used for a number of reasons, none of which are particularly specific to the United States or Scotland. There is not and has never been a formal definition of its use. The main idea is that there was a need to differentiate between two people of the same name - usually this is because there is a father and son of the same ...
3
Excellent work showing the cross-cultural regularity. Collecting the name data and summarizing it reasonably is a huge amount of work. Thank you for your contribution to public knowledge!
Unfortunately, the regularity is difficult to understand. You stated:
There is actually a reasonable explanation for this pattern: a
tendency to name sons after ...
3
Bottom Line: There is some evidence that the tendency for a few given names to dominate is also seen elsewhere in Europe, even if the top names are not John and Mary
Evidence Point 1: Lowland Scotland
Lowland Scotland is not that far removed from England anyway, but I now have evidence that the same concentration exists there too. I have (laboriously) ...
3
As efgen notes, this option used to be available in FTM. No longer having it available makes me frustrated as I used to make them often, and when upgrading to a new version you don't expect to lose features.
Perhaps you could export the FTM file to an earlier version (I see you can export as FTM Version 2008/2009)? - but then you'd need to have the earlier ...
2
It took me a full day to get this chart done, but here are two solutions:
(A) Graphic box chart with photos and some facts (birth, death)
(1) Isolate your dataset of names you want to include and copy them into a brand new file. Different programs approach this task differently. In RootsMagic, I created a 'named group' of my 81 names, exported to a gedcom ...
2
The Quaker records for Nailsworth, Gloucestershire record the death in 1728 of John White, son-in-law of Charles Fowler of Woodchester and son of Elizabeth Fowler his wife. The poor lad was only 10 when he died. He was plainly what we today would call the stepson of Charles Fowler.
2
I do find it typical and see the term used a lot, Where the children are from a previous marriage.
Just today I received a Will in which a father John Clempson, puts his trust in his daughter Elizabeth to care for his Mother in law Mary Clempson..
2
I don't think you can affirmatively tell who had more sway in naming children across so many different regions and cultures. However, you may be able to find the names or variants of them in family history. Of course there are common family given names, and often the given first or middle name will be a surname from the family. To the extent that the ...
2
The most likely reason is that the Catholic priest was German. Back then the baby's names had to correspond to a canonized saint's name. So whatever name the parents gave the child, the priest would write in the German or Latin variation of the saint's name.
During this time period, I've seen German babies in France baptized with French names, and German ...
2
Frank and Francis are the same name; one is from the Old German for "a Frenchman", the other is from the Latin for same, transmitted via Italian. E.G. Withycombe's Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names under Frank says that since about the 16th century, Frank has been "the common abbreviation" of Francis.
If you had a relative named James who signed ...
1
I have created no-name records because they are a natural home for research notes detailing what searches I have done looking for him. Aside from that, there isn't really any reason that I can see to create an empty record.
1
You could try contacting an ex-pat organization like "The Sons of Norway" if you can. Since they often have maintaining culture as part of their mission, explaining recent naming conventions might be right up their alley.
1
This often happened if the first child or children died young.
I have several ancestors of the 17th or 18th centuries where a child John was born and died in infancy. Another son was born and also called John.
Indeed in one case I do have four Johns in the one family.
This isn't necessarily the family giving the son(s) the same name as the father, in ...
1
Albert and Martha House (also known as Pattie) are part of my family history search so interesting you picked up on this name.
Pattie was her nickname.
Martha brought up my great grandmother (she was her aunt).
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