Nicknames Confuse and Confound

Nicknames Confuse and Confound
By Donna Murray

Oh those crazy celebrities and the goofy names they give their kids. Frank Zappa saddled two of his offspring with Dweezil and Moon Unit. Actors Casey Affleck and Summer Phoenix picked Indiana August for their newborn. And then there’s Tom Cruise’s daughter Suri.

   As bizarre as those appellations seem, tagging a child with an offbeat name is not a new phenomenon. Throughout history, parents have bestowed unique names on their offspring to set them apart from others.

    In the late 1800s, two women on my family tree were named Indiana. Two were called Missouri. A great-uncle’s middle name was Lemon. A slew of women in the Kentucky-Tennessee area were named Mourning. One unfortunate woman was called Mourning Pigg. And though the little flying disk was not yet a popular toy in Maryland in the late 1800s, more than one man was named Frisby.

   Enter free will. Anyone who isn’t thrilled with the name conferred at birth can opt to change it or go by a middle name. Baptismal names may replace given names and vice versa. Nicknames may be contrived by family and friends or even selected by the individual. While no one would deny a person the right to choose what they are called, the vast possibilities may vex researchers trying to determine if Uncle Bill had one wife who used Polly and Mary interchangeably or whether he was twice married. You see, Mary, Molly and Polly were used synonymously on old census rolls as were Sadie, Sudie and Sarah.

   Unless you’re psychic, there is sometimes no way to ferret out the original given name when the nickname bears no relationship to it. I could vote before I knew that my cousin Bonnie’s legal name was Phyllis. Likewise, I thought her sister’s nickname “Teeny” was a derivative of Tina. Her real name was Mary Lou.

   They came by it honestly, though. Their mother spent two years trying to convince the bureaucrats at the Social Security Administration that Mae Regina Hampshire and Mary Jane Shelley were the same person. She was baptized in New Jersey under the latter name. However, she chose to go by Mae when she was a teenager because “it was sexier,” a tidbit she shared with me when she was 97.

   Nearly every ethnic group had naming traditions and it is worth your while to bone up on them. Just plug the phrase into your search box in quotes like: “Norwegian naming patterns (traditions)”, or visit your local library.

   German immigrants in the 1700s and 1800s, for instance, named their children at birth, but later gave them baptismal names. At that point, the birth name became the middle name. That’s why there might be four boys named Johannes and three girls named Maria in one family.

   Let’s say a child was named Michael at birth. At his baptism he was given the name Johannes. From that point on, he would be known as Johannes Michael. It worked the same with girls. Clarissa might become Maria Clarissa.

Another strange custom that was popular prior to the mid-1900s was to name a newborn after a sibling who died. Consequently you might find an Ebeneezer Johnson, age 3, on the 1870 census with his parents Jane and Tobias Johnson. On the 1880 census, Jane and Tobias still have only one son named Ebeneezer, but his age is given as 2. In this situation, it is likely that the first Ebeneezer died between 1870-1880 and the Johnsons gave a new son the same name.