I love it when an unusual name pops up in my genealogical searches. Knowing that there is a break in the naming pattern alerts me that there must be an interesting story there. Beyond that, finding descendants of that unusually named person becomes easier.
Those pesky repetitions down through generations are both a blessing and an aggravation, at least for me. For example, in searching my maternal line, Hicks, I have found six men descended from one ancestor named George Washington Hicks. All of them are George Washington Hicks as well. Some are sons and grandsons of the progenitor. Some are his nephews and their sons. They all owned farms within a hundred-mile radius of the original G. W. H. Also, because they were related, several were buried in the same family cemetery. A fellow researcher wrote to tell me that the Daniel Hicks in my family tree was not the right one. How did she know that I asked? She pointed out that “her Daniel” had served in the Civil War and had enlisted at age 17. Looking more closely it became clear that “my Daniel” was only about eight years old when the war began and was still too young to enlist by the end of the war. Well, dang! That let me know that birth dates on census data matter…but even then, they vary a good bit from one census to the next. Taking some things with the proverbial grain of salt is essential in slogging through sorting out siblings versus cousins.
Oh, and to add some adventure to the task of sorting out who is who, just imagine this: each of these George Washington Hicks fellows used some of the same names for their children that their siblings had and they all had large families. I began to get an idea that all was not as it seemed when one married couple named George W. Hicks and his wife Lydia seemed to have had 23 sons and daughters. Looking closer, it turned out that there seemed to be two sons named Daniel, two daughters named Elizabeth and of course the seemingly mandatory son(s) named William.
What!? Clearly the information for two (or even three as it turned out) families had become muddled as other researchers had collected data and then posted it without noticing the duplications. Later, folks had just copied and pasted the information so that the error had become widespread. Be cautious when saving undocumented information. Sometimes it’s accurate and sometimes not so much.
It was a lengthy and admittedly tedious chore to separate the cousins and fit them into the homes with their actual parents. Bear in mind that couples did not adhere strictly to the naming patterns due to family tensions or sometimes to honor a non-family member such as a best friend, a President, or an especially influential minister or even an entertainer.
Even with the confusion this naming pattern custom created, it is still very useful in locating and matching children to parents in old documents such as the census, birth, marriage & death records. The following information was found in an online article from Family Tree It is called How to use naming patterns to find your ancestors at https://www.family-tree.co.uk/how-to-guides/how-to-use-naming-patterns-to-find-your-ancestors/.
Many countries have their own naming traditions – the English traditional is shown below and this also applies to Irish patterns: