(Hank Jones' Rules for Conducting Genealogy Research are continued from Note Nr. 1627 .)
Hank Jones' 5th Rule. Study Naming and Spelling Patterns.
I would say that he slightly misnamed this. The title suggests to me there was a habit or pattern of naming the children, such as the first male child is named for his paternal grandfather. Fortunately this is not what he in mind, which is good because it is not true. (I did a study of the naming pattern for the children in the German Lutheran Church in the Robinson River Valley and reached the conclusion there was no pattern. I believe that I gave the results in a note here.)
One subtitle to the rule might be "Learn the German phonetics". Unfortunately, there was no common rule that applied to all German-speaking lands. What was pronounced as a "P" in one area might be pronounced as a "B" in another area. Thus Plankenbuehler in Austria became Blankenbuehler in southwest Germany, and in America the distinction was very hard to discern. The letters C, G, and K interchange rather freely. Thus Klaar/Klar in Germany became Clore or Glore in America. This is why the Soundex system came into use. It tries to capture these equivalents.
Many of the first names in Germany have obvious equivalents in English, but Jacob to James is not so obvious. One of the Finks babies was named "Jacobus or James" in the baptismal register. Adolph could become Adam. Melchior could become Michael. Rarely would the reverse of these occur.
Perhaps the hardest thing for us to understand is the practice of giving kids in the same family the same names. I believe the Steinseifers had an example of this. The reuse of names after the death of the first one is very common. When we put the two examples or practices together we are never sure whether the first child has died or the name is being duplicated.
By now we are familiar with the pattern of use of the two first names. Generally, it is the second name which is used as the calling or speaking name. The use of both names is not uncommon, especially in formal documents. We had John Michael Smith and John Paul Vaught, though women more typically did this as Anna Barbara Fisher did.
We also know that Junior or Senior did not mean then what they do today. It made perfect sense to them when they wrote Barbara Carpenter, Jun. Hank Jones summed it up by saying that we must not bring our Twentieth Century mind-set to the problems of the Eighteenth Century. We must adjust.
(Hank Jones' Rules are continued in the next Note, Nr. 1629.)
(26 Mar 03)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.