UNUSUAL ANCESTOR NAMES ~ How Many Are in Your Family Tree? Where Did They Originate?

Most of us have them.  Those ancestor names that you just don’t see any more, or very seldom.

I’ve run across them for years, names like Achsah, American, Ancil, Artemesia, Awilda, Burdell, Calvary, Carpas, Dorcas, Gershom, Hazen, Jerusha, Kezia, Lavancha, Nabby, Orpha, Philena, Serepta, Simeon, Udora, Vivaldo, Zenis, Zilpha.  Those are just some of the examples from my own family tree, which has 5,539 individuals in it.

Of course we know that names can be passed down from generation to generation.  Isn’t that what keep us wondering “do I have the right person?”

There are common names like Mary, David, William, John, Matthew, Susan etc.  We certainly have no shortage of those.

Here is an article in Wikipedia about the origin of given names. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Given_name

What got me thinking about his subject was yesterday’s church service.  We were studying from the book of Philemon in the New Testament.  Now that’s not a name you hear every day, or one I’ve ever heard at all, outside of Bible study. 

Yesterday afternoon, I met my long time friend, for lunch and we were discussing the church service when she told me that one of the landscape workers in her community was named Philemon.  Spelled exactly the same way.  What are the chances?

That got me thinking about another name in the book of Philemon, which is Onesimus.  It’s actually Onesimus about whom the Apostle Paul was writing when he wrote the letter to Philemon.

I know that many of the names given to our ancestors were from various books, whether it was the Bible, some other religious book or a book someone had just read.

Being a curious person, I decided to check the records on Ancestry and see if anyone had the name Onesimus. 

I did a general search in United States records and found there were 29,054,223 records containing the name Onesimus or a variation of it.  WOW!  I was quite surprised.

I found many of the records were in “modern” times, from 1900 to now.

Let’s see how many Philemon’s there are.  This time I searched both United States and All Collections.  Here are the results.

United States only – 75,441,670

All Collections – 103,751,123

This has been a fun little excursion away from my usual research today. 

I know I’m not the only one who wonders about these things.  What fun searches have you conducted?

Guess I better get back to finding records or figuring out DNA or something useful, huh?

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2018   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION

COUNTING NAMES ~ How many of your immediate family given names are in your tree?

Family names.  Of my immediate family, parents, siblings and me, how many others in my family tree have the same given names that we do?

My parents – Harry & Patricia

My siblings & me – Diane, Harry, Norlaine, Virginia & John

In order to create this list I used the Search tab in my Legacy 8 program.  Then I used Find, Detailed Search and entered my criteria.  I didn’t use any middle names when creating my lists because I used the criteria “contains,” which will find both first and middle names.

(CLICK ON ANY IMAGE TO ENLARGE IT)

Please refer to my blog post about using the Legacy 8 search feature for more details. This will give you step by step details on searching.
Legacy 8 - The Search Function - What Can You Find?

Here are the lists created by searching my family names.


JOHN

HARRY

PATRICIA

VIRGINIA

DIANE

NORLAINE

My oldest sister, Norlaine, was named combining my father’s middle name, Norman and his wife, Elaine.  I have never found anyone else with her given name.

By the numbers, here’s what I found.
John – 203
Harry – 20
Patricia – 7
Virginia – 6
Diane – 5
Norlaine – 1

No big surprise that John was the most numerous name.

Have you ever run this kind of report on your family names?  If so, what did you find?

OTHER POSTS THAT MAY BE OF INTEREST

Name Lists - How to use them in your research

Birth records with incorrect names - What would you think?

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2016   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION