View Article
What's in a Name - Part 2
by Val Atkinson
Article ID: 35, First Published: March 2006An ancestor of mine had five children:
• MINERVA Weldon
• Jessie MONTROSE Weldon
• Ernest SYRIA Weldon
• Percival WELDON
• Walter WELDON
I spent quite a long time trying to work out where names like Minerva/Montrose/Syria came from.
I was looking for (eg) a female ancestor with the surname MONTROSE.
Eventually I found out he was a regular soldier in the West Yorkshire Regiment. He fought in the Boer War, and was killed in WW1 in France at the age of 35, leaving a wife and these five children. Three of them were named after the troop ships that had carried him to foreign parts.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
When people were married, took their children to be christened or had relatives buried in the church yard, they didn’t fill in forms with the details. They told the vicar or priest, and he wrote it down on a piece of paper or in a notebook.
Later, when the services were over, he transcribed what he had heard into the registers, so what we read there today represents his aural record of what he thought the people had said.
What the vicar produced can give us an insight into the accent/dialect of people from different counties. For example:
Lincolnshire:
• Lincolnshire folk have a habit of dropping the middle consonant in a word. A burial entry said Mary STEANS but checking showed the correct name to be Mary STEVENS
Yorkshire:
• If you saw the name DOW you would pronounce it as rhyming with eg ‘loud’ or ‘cloud’. How then does this same name appear on records as DAWE, which you would pronounce like ‘door’ or DOE which is pronounced as in ‘go’? This echoes Yorkshire speech, and reminds me of my late mother in law who was a Yorkshire lass.
Durham:
• The various spellings of the surname GATISS give an insight into Durham dialect. If you didn’t know how to pronounce it, the records would tell you, because it often appears as GAYTERS/GAYTISS/GATESS.
• Harder to understand is the spelling of GEATESS/GEATES. You would have to hear a Durham person speaking to understand this one.
• I’m from County Durham, and if ever I spell things out for people, eg b-a-t-t-l-e, they think my ‘a’ is an ‘e’, and I always have to say ‘a for apple’.
• The spelling of GEATES is echoing this Durham dialect feature.
London Area:
• One of my ancestors was born in the north of England with parents who were born in London. Their child’s birth certificate showed mother’s maiden name as TOWNS. I spent a couple of years searching for Elizabeth TOWNS until I discovered her name was TONES. The spelling of TOWNS reflects London dialect.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Sometimes spellings are influenced by how fast a person speaks. Though the surnames HOWD and HOWARD both exist in their own right, I have seen them intermixed in records because the vicar listening to the information has misheard the local ‘rapid fire’ speech
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Some times local people change word endings. This happens in all English counties, but two examples from Durham are JARROW, which becomes JARRER and KELLOE which becomes KELLER
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Once I went to collect my small nieces from school. They lived in a town only six miles from my own home, but even with such a short distance their accent was different to mine. Their school was called Mill Hill. I pronounced this ‘Millill’, while they said: ‘Meeleel’.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
The passage of time and numerous transcriptions can subtly change a place name, until family members whose ancestors emigrated from England have no idea what the original was.
Knowledgeable county researchers who know their towns and villages can spot these anomolies.
• Shickley should be Throckley
• Blanchard should be Blanchland
• Winlation should be Winlaton
• Shelltown should be Shildon
• Sheat Hill should be Sheriff Hill
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Subtle changes can also occur in family names.
• Courtland should be Coulthard
• Aisbett should be Arkless
One of the best examples I ever came across of a name evolving through time was when I was asked to locate a marriage in Cornwall for the surname TORVOLA. I couldn’t find a single example of this name anywhere, and concluded the family must have come from another county.
I telephoned the Cornwall Register Office for help, and was told to remember this rhyme when looking for traditional Cornish names: ‘By the TRE-POL-PEN you’ll find your Cornishmen’.
The surname turned out to be TREWARTHA
WHAT’S THE PURPOSE OF ALL THIS?
Well, it’s much the same as when I first wrote about names in 2004. Just a reminder never to take any name at face value, and above all to have an open mind.
Always think twice. These rules apply no matter
• How attached we are to certain spellings
• How convinced we are that a certain way is the way
• What revered family authority has laid down the ‘spelling law’
• How many times we’ve seen it spelled our favourite way.
Success in research depends on:
• Becoming suspicious, devious, and lateral
• Accepting the unexpected as the most expected
• Viewing the impossible as highly probable
• Putting the sublime and ridiculous down as daily events
• Seeing the bizarre as the epitome of normality
With all this in mind, success is just around the corner!
