Nov 2011
In the second of this month’s Eneclann expert guest blog posts Fiona Fitzsimons discusses traditional Irish naming patterns, knowledge of which can be extremely helpful in piecing together your Irish family history.
In Ireland there was traditionally a very strong naming pattern for the eldest children born into a family:
A similar pattern existed for naming the oldest daughters in a family. However it was not as strictly adhered to and frequently, amongst the wealthy at least, we see girl’s names influenced by fashion. It may be that as girls married into their husband’s family and so ‘lost’ their own family name, the preservation of Christian names was not considered as important for female infants.
Unusually, this naming pattern for the sons was adhered to by all economic classes and across all denominations in Ireland. Consequently, it’s not unusual to see the same names recurring within the family across generations. This can prove extremely helpful in linking names in your family tree together, particularly if the name in question is in anyway unusual.
Naming patterns are sometimes obscured by deaths in infancy. However, where a specific name was considered important within the family, the name would usually be given to the next-born infant. Thus you can sometimes find two or more children of the same name, baptised within the same family. Each baptism of this name, usually indicates the death of the older child of this name, but also tells us that the parents wanted to keep this name alive within the family.
Another instance in which this naming pattern can be thrown out is when a child was stillborn or born sickly or dying. The child might then be baptised using a family name, but the name of the paternal grandfather might be ‘reserved’ for a live birth, or for a child expected to live. This is based entirely on anecdotal evidence, and refers to a number of known cases in all four provinces, which occurred over the last century.
Sometimes, however, what may at first glance appear to be a high level of infant mortality, and the re-use of the same Christian name several times within a family, can actually obscure the survival of a much older practice.
In the early modern period there was a high incidence of infant mortality. It was common practice within many families to use the same Christian names for children that had died in order to keep the names alive in the family.
Case Study - the Teare family
This practice is best observed by looking at a case study. A number of years ago I was researching for a client and came across the Teare family. With a few exceptions, none of the Teare children were baptised in the same year, and there was a minimum gap of 14 months between baptismal records. There were exceptions, when children of the same name, to fathers of the same name were baptised often within the same year. We widened our search to consider all the baptismal records from this period and found an interesting pattern emerging. The St. Michans registers recorded the baptism of the same male infant twice in 1685: “John son of Samuel Teare, gent, and Mary his wife” was first baptised on 24th Feby. 1685; the registers showed that this child was again baptised on the 12th April 1685. He was buried on 9th August 1685, and a note was retrospectively written against the April record - “he is dead”.
We see this same practice repeated at this time within the parish registers – a child re-baptised, followed shortly afterwards by a burial record. The evidence points to the only possible conclusion that in each of these cases, the infant was baptised a second time, possibly to try and counteract an illness and ‘encourage’ the child to ‘come on’ in health, a common superstition attached to the sacrament of baptism at that time, even within the reformed church.
There may be many more instances of this practise, which are obscured by incomplete records. The latest instance of this practice that I’ve observed is in the 1780s, in a Church of Ireland family.
Through cases such as that of the Teare family we can see how important, and useful, a knowledge of these traditional Irish naming patterns can be during your Irish family history research.
- Fiona Fitzsimons
au pair england says: learn a lot!! thanks for sharing!
This is a says: Fantastic story, reckoned we could mix a few unconnected information, however really worth looking, whoa performed 1 find out about Middle of the East has got much more problerms too.
[...] Findmypast.ie blog had an interesting post called “Traditional Irish naming patterns” written by Fiona Fitzsimons of Eneclann. If you have Irish ancestry this is something you [...]
Roz says: Thanks for the info - I’ll look again at some of my family names! In my paternal ancestors line I have a Pockridge Dancey born about 1809/10; there were several other Pockridge Dancy’s(various spellings)born around this time/late 18th century & one as far back as mid-late 1600’s. But while I know they must be connected somehow to my ancestors, I just can find out how! Roz
Roz says: A query: was there a naming pattern to middle names? If so how did this work in with the first names?
Roz
John Hayes says: “the eldest son would be named after his paternal grandfather
the second son after his maternal grandfather
the third son after his father”
What if the eldest child was a daughter, then two sons, as in my family history. The 1st was a daughter, Norah, the second, James, and third, John. John was given the name of his father. Would that suggest that James’ Maternal Grandfather would be James as well?
James Barnwell says: Another interesting article! Ive found my g g grandparents and their children. when the children married- they named sons and daughters after brothers and sisters.
Bill Leacock says: Be careful when trying to use the naming pattern as a link. It is not uncommon for two sons to have first born sons around the same time, and thus there would be two children named after the grandfather
Mike McDonnell says: Great article, much help. I’ve observed in my family the pattern appears to be reversed ie, the first son named after the mothers father and so on. Is the issue of mortality obscuring the matter do you think or is there maybe another reason for this.
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