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.

[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.