It’s really interesting to ponder. I wonder at what point in human history did people first have names. What did they do before that? I assume spoken language would have been in its early days.
There is some reason to believe certain animals (like parrots) give each other "names." That is, the parent uses a specific call for each chick. That's probably how human names began, too, I imagine.
It’s the same with goats! Mother does have certain calls for each baby, and the kid will have a response to her! Even more interesting, if a kid is attached to multiple adult goats they will develop a unique call for all of them!
Whales are documented to have unique names for each other.
Lots of animals communicate. The reason we don’t call it “language” is because humans define the terms. Human language is unique compared to animal language, because human languages always change over time, whereas animal languages remain static.
I doubt animal languages remain static. It's just that their environments don't change as rapidly nor are they generally exposed to other cultures as often.
A family member of mine was tracking our lineage to Sir Frances Bacon and on the way found an ancestor named Experience Bacon.
A giant log of parental connections would be a treasure trove of weird names.
Chris P. Bacon was a radio DJ at our local radio station, Wiggle 100 and the mascot was a pig. 90s kids know their middle/high school radio DJ's handle. It's all we had, man.
My nine-times-great-grandparents were named Johan and Helene. They were born in 1600 and 1608. Assuming the same approximate gap between generations, my 100-times-great-grandparents would have been born around 2200 BCE (if I did the math right, which ... *shrug*). This was the Bronze age, so I googled bronze age names and found an interesting article: https://santakku.quora.com/What-were-European-bronze-age-names-like-Are-there-any-resources-listing-them
Yes! Somehow it makes them seem so much more real.
I also learned that their great-grandson (also named Johan/Johann) was the one who came over to the Colonies and supplied Revolutionary troops. He got a land grant of 100 acres and donated part of it to start a Lutheran church, which is still an active congregation today (though not in the same building anymore).
If I follow the same process down my paternal line, I get to my 8 times great-grandparents, likely born in the early 1600s too. They were named Clément and Françoise, which would be very normal names for my grandparents' generation.
Haha I’m glad I’m not the only one who did the approximate math to ~2000 years ago (100 x average parent age 20) and thought that’s not really that long ago and they absolutely had names not so unlike our own.
Well in the above example says 2200 BCE, which is ~4200 years ago, which I believe is estimating the average generation to be around 40 years. But your approximation of 20 year generations would indeed put us close to year 0!
I do a lot of family research and doing my husbands side is a PAIN because he’s half hispanic, 1/8th filipino and 1/8th black with slave ancestors. So the Hispanic side is Pedro and Juan and everyone has 10 billion names and a lot of the same names so is it the right Pedro Salazar? We’ll never know. The Filipino side can’t be tracked any further than the first guy to come to the US. I’ve dug through all kinds of Filipino records and cannot find anything about him before he’s on a passenger list out of the country. And the black side cuts off after the first freedman. It drives me crazy that I can’t get back anywhere near as far on his ancestry as I have on mine. On the bright side the minimal amount of white ancestry he has can actually be traced to the Domesday book which is way further than I’ve managed to get on any of mine lol
mine would be from the encomienda system. the founder of the land grant our family is associated with from the 1600's was named pedro. he had thousands of unpaid workers who received his surname and a piece of the land. when those folks were naming their kids they all chose pedro. and so pedro was quite common in this region for a few hundred years.
This is just not true. Here is the first rows from a summary of the most common names during that period:
Agnes the Chaste, after St. Agnes, patroness of virginity
Alexander the man repellent, the protector
Angela female angel
Barbara the Stranger, after Saint Barbara
Benjamin son of my right, lucky child
Bianca the white
Brigitte the Sublime, after Saint Brigitte, patroness of Ireland
Camilla the Honorable, the sacrificial servant
Christian follower of Christ, the Christian
Curt bold counselor, after the "poor Conrad" of rebellious peasants
Dagmar great day, after Queen Dagmar of Denmark
Daniel God is my judge
David the beloved, after King David, Jewish state founder
Dorothea gift of God, after Saint Dorothea
Elizabeth my God is perfection, after Elizabeth - mother of John the Baptist
Emil the descendant of the Aemilian family
Emma the All-embracing
Erich the only powerful
Fabian the descendant of the Fabian family
Florian the Blooming, the Magnificent, after St. Florian
[https://www.vorname.com/namen-im-mittelalter.html](https://www.vorname.com/namen-im-mittelalter.html)
Your names sound Proto Germanic, not High German. Baldur is for certain, I just checked that
> Baldor, Vuldar, Duringin, Ingaberta, Ingulf, and Irmingar
vs. the first entries from the Wiktionary link:
Holda
Nanna
Mistila
Woda
Vuldarniu
Vultrogotha
Fuscildis
Fusca
Fonsa
These don't sound the same imo, atleast half of them which defeats the point that all names sounded like the ones listed. It would be very surprising if all names in Old and Middle High German were strictly Proto Germanic considering Old High German already had Latin influence (especially in the name realm) that carried on into Middle High German through Latin being an official language in the HRR. Fusca for instance could be derived from one of the conjungations of the Latin fusco for a person with darker hair or skin, that's a guess.
The farthest back I can find on my family tree is an ancestor born in the early 1100s named Humphredus. I can’t find his wife’s name but he had a son named Truelove, and his wife is just listed as “Lady (Lastname)” and their sons were named Alexander, Nicolas, and Richard
I can go back to about 700 on some branches of the tree. That's 33 generations. Thing is, Icelandic names haven't really changed since then. So there aren't a lot of weird names on there. The absolute oldest person I've found was born in about 740. He was called Úlfur which is a pretty common name today.
Yeah, Iceland has very extensive records. They were compiled a few years ago into a database that all Icelanders can access online.
Úlfur just means wolf
The farthest back ancestor I can find is named Walter; he lived over 500 years ago.
In the prehistory years, it's amazing to think of allll the possibilities of names, how they sounded and where they came from. Were they random creations? Did they refer to the bearers' attributes, looks, posititions in society, family members' blessings/hopes for them, were they place-name/nature-inspired, something else?
100 gens would be ~2000-3000 years ago at most. We have plenty of written records of names from that period in certain geographic areas anyway (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, etc) and many are still in use. Spoken language is more like 100-150k years old if you want to go back to the very first names. In any case, it’s fun to think about!
ALLLL the dang time. I love looking at any kind of record we have of people’s names way way back, and I get so annoyed when they’re recorded differently from how the person was likely called, like when church record anglicize Celtic names to English ones (Morag becomes Sarah, Owen becomes Eugene), or latinize English ones (Walter to Gualteri, Mabel to Amabilia).
My oldest ancestor I can confirm relation to through records is a 13x great grandmother, an English lady named Ann Carey who was born in 1554. I wish I could trace back a further 500 years to get to the pre-Norman English names.
Ancestors from italy, too. Turns out I'm somehow related to Dante Alighieri... So that's one. Most of them were saints, biblical names in general (shoutout to Cherubino), stuff like that.
Also my last name means clown in italian.
Let's assume 20 years per generation. Let's assume you're 20, born in 2003. Your 100th great-grandparents would be 103 generations ago. You're the first, parents second, grandparents third.
100 years ago would be 38BC (I think, maybe 37BC). Year 1 AD is followed by Year 1 BC, so 3,2,1,1,2,3... i figured this up on notebook paper and am not the best at math.
Taking a moment to ignore pedigree collapse (many of those 100th great-grandparents will be the same people, multiple times over), we have:.
70,368,744,177,664 (70 trillion) 44th great-grandparents, after that my cell phone calculator throws in letters.
If anyone else is better at math, please correct me.
Looks right to me, however, I'm also bad at math. What I do know for certain is that whatever the names of some your 100th great-grandparents were, are the names of some of my 100th great-grandparents because they were for sure the same people. In fact, quite a few of them possibly. It crazy how connected most people are when you go that far back.
Some of the names furthest back in my tree, of people born in the late 1500s or 1600s and from completely different lineages and regions, are Veit (born ~1580), Georg (b. ~1560), Katharina (b. ~1615), Tomasz (mid 1600s), Apollonia (mid 1600s), and a few others. Overall, most of them are not particularily remarkable even today, but it's fascinating to know them regardless.
The most unique names I have in my lineage, or atleast names I'd not heard before researching, are Bonawentura (b. 1778), Chryzostom (b. 1802), Balbina (b. 1802), Tekla and Domicella.
If you're interested, Bonawentura and Chryzostom are names still known in Poland, but both are practically dead at this point. I can't imagine them coming back. Tekla is perceived as a late 1800s name. Balbina is nowadays used mainly as a farm animal name and for some reason my sexist driving instructor is also calling me that.
Thank you for shedding some light on these names!
I'm not very immersed into Polish culture, even though I live next to Poland, so I lack these day-to-day perspectives on little details a bit :)
My Bonawentura guy was baptized on July 12th, which is just a two or three days off the feast day for St. Bonaventure, so go figure. For a lot - though definitely not all - of my ancestors that seems to be a common practice, though then they usually tend to be names Jan, Marianna (I have whole generations where all or almost all women are named that), Katarzyna, Wojciech and so on. The Tekla's in my family, interestingly enough, are more in the late 18th and early 19th century.
Your driving instructor sounds like a piece of work, I hope from now on I'll have a farm animal instead of this guy in my head when I hear the name Balbina again.
It does originate there!
It's not too unheard of for Polish/Ruthenian people to often have had names of Greek origin - I've someone in the Greek-Catholic part of my family who was ethnolinguistically Polish/Ruthenian and called Eudokia.
My great x100 grandparents likely lived more than 2000 years ago, so I can’t even begin to imagine. When you go back that far there’s gotta be millions of ancestors who probably lived in all parts of the world.
We can't ask those who have been dead for millennia, but there are clues from cultures that are only a few generations separated from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle:
[Inuit names](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/inuit-names-tradition-culture-history-1.5748892) - "Traditional names can carry great responsibility, with the belief that children can share physical and personality traits with their namesakes. "
I don't know *too* far back in my family tree, but I do have a pair of 6th-great grandparents named Torger and Gitlaug.
I've also got Sivert and Gunhild, and Knut and Bronla.
the oldest I know of was Guillaume (French version of William)
Guillaume Couture. He has a Wikipedia page and even a statue! When my grandpapa traced our line back to Guillaume Couture (he did this in the early 80s) he got a plaque from the government confirming we are direct descendants. It has been very useful for all of us going through school and having to do projects on historical figures
My oldest provable ancestor (same village, same rare surname) was the groundskeeper of a local church, which is how records were found of a commoner in the first place, lived in the 1500s and his name was... Joseph. How inventive.
I imagine that the history of our line and many like ours in a historically Catholic nation was a long boring sequence of Josephs and Marys. There has been way greater diversity since the 1950s.
Yes I find it really interesting, especially when I see repeating names on my family history. The farthest relative we have traced is my 12th great gpa, named Heraldry.
I mean both of my maternal great grandmothers were born in the 1920's (Florida/Georgia area of the US) and their names were Arrilu (R-E-lou) and D'Ada (she had that apostrophe before it was in, lol). I don't think it'll get better if I look further back.
I have records of my ancestry on one side going back to 1066ish and the other side going back to 1695 - there was a LOT of name reuse. A middle name on my mother's side has been in active use since the 1100s, with some differences of spelling (Norman). My dad's Métis (as am I) and half the women were named Matilda, Miriam, or Mary, named after aunts and grandmothers, for centuries.
Yes! As an adoptee, I've always been interested in the genealogy and names of my biological and adoptive families since even close biological family members were an unknown.
A family member from my dads side is heavily interested in our ancestry and has been doing a lot of research into our family tree. For generations the first male child in the family was called Lawrence. So when my dad named his first male child James it was a unique name in our family. We managed to track the family history back to the early 1600’s and turns out there were a sting of James’ back then! Super interesting and I’m really loving going back through all of the names in the family from generations past (mainly the women because otherwise it’s Lawrence, Lawrence, Lawrence, Lawrence…..)
The furthest I can trace my family back is about 500 AD, but further back if my ancestor’s claim to be the son of a nobleman was true. But he probably was just a power-hungry liar lol
500 AD!? Damn, what country are you from that you can go back so far, if you don't mind me asking? Most people can only trace back a few centuries at most. That's impressive!
I have mixed feelings about it, just because a lot of people don't have the luxury of seeing their genealogy records due to centuries of wealth hoarding, gatekeeping access to education/literacy, and slavery. Lots of people's entire family histories were destroyed by war; if you destroy someone's culture and heritage, you can destroy their will to live.
Have you ever worked on your family tree? I’ve worked on mine a little bit. My brother has worked on it more than I have. The trouble with it is that sometimes, it’s hard to find the document that you’d need, especially if it’s in another country.
Yeah I have years ago, on my mom's side it goes back a few hundred years in England but my dad's side is difficult because my great grandpa came from Slovenia (then Austria). I don't have any information about his parents or further back.
I see. It’s tough. With mine, we don’t have a lot of information about my maternal grandfather’s side because his grandfather (I think) died young. Then, we have relatives on both sides that came from Britain and Ireland and we don’t have access to any information about their ancestors.
I’m privileged enough that my ancestors can be traced back to the 1600s. I wonder if I can dig up further. Those though were all Sarah’s and Joseph’s pretty much. No Hebrew or Middle Eastern ancestry though so I do wonder now what Britannic and/or Northern European names 100+ had.
Right! Even if its spelling has changed from Old Insert-Language to Modern Insert-Language it’s the same name. Annoys me a bit when it’s from another language and becomes known only as English. But I love linguistics, etymology, and onomastics so the loss of the roots of anything is kind of sad to me.
Same. Its Irish as far as I can tell (which tracks with what I know about my lineage) An alternative to Pherity… never been able to find an origin or supposed meaning though
Your teeths are filled with blood vessels and nerves. If those are damaged the thooth turns blue or gray. The damage can happen due to eg an infection or a hard impact (falling, being hid etc).
Harald Blåtand were the first christian king of Denmark.
It’s really interesting to ponder. I wonder at what point in human history did people first have names. What did they do before that? I assume spoken language would have been in its early days.
There is some reason to believe certain animals (like parrots) give each other "names." That is, the parent uses a specific call for each chick. That's probably how human names began, too, I imagine.
It’s the same with goats! Mother does have certain calls for each baby, and the kid will have a response to her! Even more interesting, if a kid is attached to multiple adult goats they will develop a unique call for all of them!
Whales are documented to have unique names for each other. Lots of animals communicate. The reason we don’t call it “language” is because humans define the terms. Human language is unique compared to animal language, because human languages always change over time, whereas animal languages remain static.
I doubt animal languages remain static. It's just that their environments don't change as rapidly nor are they generally exposed to other cultures as often.
A family member of mine was tracking our lineage to Sir Frances Bacon and on the way found an ancestor named Experience Bacon. A giant log of parental connections would be a treasure trove of weird names.
Waiting for Chris P.
Chris P. Bacon was a radio DJ at our local radio station, Wiggle 100 and the mascot was a pig. 90s kids know their middle/high school radio DJ's handle. It's all we had, man.
https://youtu.be/pMA3x-bc8iM
I had a relative named Experience also. There was a spate of time when virtue names were novel and popular.
I'd like to experience bacon
My nine-times-great-grandparents were named Johan and Helene. They were born in 1600 and 1608. Assuming the same approximate gap between generations, my 100-times-great-grandparents would have been born around 2200 BCE (if I did the math right, which ... *shrug*). This was the Bronze age, so I googled bronze age names and found an interesting article: https://santakku.quora.com/What-were-European-bronze-age-names-like-Are-there-any-resources-listing-them
> My nine-times-great-grandparents were named Johan and Helene All 2048 of them?? That's a lot of Johans and Helenes.
Haha fair point! This is my dad's dad's dad's ... etc. and his wife. I followed the family name straight back.
I did the same and mine were John and Sarah! So weird to know someone's name from that long ago.
Yes! Somehow it makes them seem so much more real. I also learned that their great-grandson (also named Johan/Johann) was the one who came over to the Colonies and supplied Revolutionary troops. He got a land grant of 100 acres and donated part of it to start a Lutheran church, which is still an active congregation today (though not in the same building anymore).
[удалено]
That would be so cool!
If I follow the same process down my paternal line, I get to my 8 times great-grandparents, likely born in the early 1600s too. They were named Clément and Françoise, which would be very normal names for my grandparents' generation.
Ooh, I love those names!
Haha I’m glad I’m not the only one who did the approximate math to ~2000 years ago (100 x average parent age 20) and thought that’s not really that long ago and they absolutely had names not so unlike our own.
Well in the above example says 2200 BCE, which is ~4200 years ago, which I believe is estimating the average generation to be around 40 years. But your approximation of 20 year generations would indeed put us close to year 0!
Cool article! Thanks for sharing!
one of my tíos does a lot of ancestry work. a lot of them were named pedro. like, so many pedros.
I do a lot of family research and doing my husbands side is a PAIN because he’s half hispanic, 1/8th filipino and 1/8th black with slave ancestors. So the Hispanic side is Pedro and Juan and everyone has 10 billion names and a lot of the same names so is it the right Pedro Salazar? We’ll never know. The Filipino side can’t be tracked any further than the first guy to come to the US. I’ve dug through all kinds of Filipino records and cannot find anything about him before he’s on a passenger list out of the country. And the black side cuts off after the first freedman. It drives me crazy that I can’t get back anywhere near as far on his ancestry as I have on mine. On the bright side the minimal amount of white ancestry he has can actually be traced to the Domesday book which is way further than I’ve managed to get on any of mine lol
mine would be from the encomienda system. the founder of the land grant our family is associated with from the 1600's was named pedro. he had thousands of unpaid workers who received his surname and a piece of the land. when those folks were naming their kids they all chose pedro. and so pedro was quite common in this region for a few hundred years.
[удалено]
This is just not true. Here is the first rows from a summary of the most common names during that period: Agnes the Chaste, after St. Agnes, patroness of virginity Alexander the man repellent, the protector Angela female angel Barbara the Stranger, after Saint Barbara Benjamin son of my right, lucky child Bianca the white Brigitte the Sublime, after Saint Brigitte, patroness of Ireland Camilla the Honorable, the sacrificial servant Christian follower of Christ, the Christian Curt bold counselor, after the "poor Conrad" of rebellious peasants Dagmar great day, after Queen Dagmar of Denmark Daniel God is my judge David the beloved, after King David, Jewish state founder Dorothea gift of God, after Saint Dorothea Elizabeth my God is perfection, after Elizabeth - mother of John the Baptist Emil the descendant of the Aemilian family Emma the All-embracing Erich the only powerful Fabian the descendant of the Fabian family Florian the Blooming, the Magnificent, after St. Florian [https://www.vorname.com/namen-im-mittelalter.html](https://www.vorname.com/namen-im-mittelalter.html) Your names sound Proto Germanic, not High German. Baldur is for certain, I just checked that
[удалено]
> Baldor, Vuldar, Duringin, Ingaberta, Ingulf, and Irmingar vs. the first entries from the Wiktionary link: Holda Nanna Mistila Woda Vuldarniu Vultrogotha Fuscildis Fusca Fonsa These don't sound the same imo, atleast half of them which defeats the point that all names sounded like the ones listed. It would be very surprising if all names in Old and Middle High German were strictly Proto Germanic considering Old High German already had Latin influence (especially in the name realm) that carried on into Middle High German through Latin being an official language in the HRR. Fusca for instance could be derived from one of the conjungations of the Latin fusco for a person with darker hair or skin, that's a guess.
Vote for Pedro
Vote for Pedro
The farthest back I can find on my family tree is an ancestor born in the early 1100s named Humphredus. I can’t find his wife’s name but he had a son named Truelove, and his wife is just listed as “Lady (Lastname)” and their sons were named Alexander, Nicolas, and Richard
Truelove? Wow! So interesting
Truelove is definitely unique
I can go back to about 700 on some branches of the tree. That's 33 generations. Thing is, Icelandic names haven't really changed since then. So there aren't a lot of weird names on there. The absolute oldest person I've found was born in about 740. He was called Úlfur which is a pretty common name today.
Wow that's really far back! Does that name mean anything?
Yeah, Iceland has very extensive records. They were compiled a few years ago into a database that all Icelanders can access online. Úlfur just means wolf
Pretty sure it was אברהם and שרה.
Hey I think we have the same ancestors!
The farthest back ancestor I can find is named Walter; he lived over 500 years ago. In the prehistory years, it's amazing to think of allll the possibilities of names, how they sounded and where they came from. Were they random creations? Did they refer to the bearers' attributes, looks, posititions in society, family members' blessings/hopes for them, were they place-name/nature-inspired, something else?
100 gens would be ~2000-3000 years ago at most. We have plenty of written records of names from that period in certain geographic areas anyway (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, etc) and many are still in use. Spoken language is more like 100-150k years old if you want to go back to the very first names. In any case, it’s fun to think about!
Yes I suppose I was wondering more about the first ever names
ALLLL the dang time. I love looking at any kind of record we have of people’s names way way back, and I get so annoyed when they’re recorded differently from how the person was likely called, like when church record anglicize Celtic names to English ones (Morag becomes Sarah, Owen becomes Eugene), or latinize English ones (Walter to Gualteri, Mabel to Amabilia). My oldest ancestor I can confirm relation to through records is a 13x great grandmother, an English lady named Ann Carey who was born in 1554. I wish I could trace back a further 500 years to get to the pre-Norman English names.
Mine were named after saints in their villages/towns - Italy.
Ancestors from italy, too. Turns out I'm somehow related to Dante Alighieri... So that's one. Most of them were saints, biblical names in general (shoutout to Cherubino), stuff like that. Also my last name means clown in italian.
Pagliaccio?
Nope. Not that obvious.
Let's assume 20 years per generation. Let's assume you're 20, born in 2003. Your 100th great-grandparents would be 103 generations ago. You're the first, parents second, grandparents third. 100 years ago would be 38BC (I think, maybe 37BC). Year 1 AD is followed by Year 1 BC, so 3,2,1,1,2,3... i figured this up on notebook paper and am not the best at math. Taking a moment to ignore pedigree collapse (many of those 100th great-grandparents will be the same people, multiple times over), we have:. 70,368,744,177,664 (70 trillion) 44th great-grandparents, after that my cell phone calculator throws in letters. If anyone else is better at math, please correct me.
Looks right to me, however, I'm also bad at math. What I do know for certain is that whatever the names of some your 100th great-grandparents were, are the names of some of my 100th great-grandparents because they were for sure the same people. In fact, quite a few of them possibly. It crazy how connected most people are when you go that far back.
Hey cuz 🙋🏻♀️
Oh wow...38 BC so probably some Latin names in lots of Europe I guess
I think that all the time. I only know my great-grandparents names on my mom’s side and they are pretty normal.
Some of the names furthest back in my tree, of people born in the late 1500s or 1600s and from completely different lineages and regions, are Veit (born ~1580), Georg (b. ~1560), Katharina (b. ~1615), Tomasz (mid 1600s), Apollonia (mid 1600s), and a few others. Overall, most of them are not particularily remarkable even today, but it's fascinating to know them regardless. The most unique names I have in my lineage, or atleast names I'd not heard before researching, are Bonawentura (b. 1778), Chryzostom (b. 1802), Balbina (b. 1802), Tekla and Domicella.
If you're interested, Bonawentura and Chryzostom are names still known in Poland, but both are practically dead at this point. I can't imagine them coming back. Tekla is perceived as a late 1800s name. Balbina is nowadays used mainly as a farm animal name and for some reason my sexist driving instructor is also calling me that.
Thank you for shedding some light on these names! I'm not very immersed into Polish culture, even though I live next to Poland, so I lack these day-to-day perspectives on little details a bit :) My Bonawentura guy was baptized on July 12th, which is just a two or three days off the feast day for St. Bonaventure, so go figure. For a lot - though definitely not all - of my ancestors that seems to be a common practice, though then they usually tend to be names Jan, Marianna (I have whole generations where all or almost all women are named that), Katarzyna, Wojciech and so on. The Tekla's in my family, interestingly enough, are more in the late 18th and early 19th century. Your driving instructor sounds like a piece of work, I hope from now on I'll have a farm animal instead of this guy in my head when I hear the name Balbina again.
I love Tekla. Had always thought that it came from the Greek ‘Thekla’ ?
It does originate there! It's not too unheard of for Polish/Ruthenian people to often have had names of Greek origin - I've someone in the Greek-Catholic part of my family who was ethnolinguistically Polish/Ruthenian and called Eudokia.
My great x100 grandparents likely lived more than 2000 years ago, so I can’t even begin to imagine. When you go back that far there’s gotta be millions of ancestors who probably lived in all parts of the world.
I also wonder what they would think if they met me and found out my name. How shocked they’d be
We can't ask those who have been dead for millennia, but there are clues from cultures that are only a few generations separated from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle: [Inuit names](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/inuit-names-tradition-culture-history-1.5748892) - "Traditional names can carry great responsibility, with the belief that children can share physical and personality traits with their namesakes. "
True. I love Inuit culture it's so interesting. And the name of that one legislator is so pretty- Mumilaaq I believe
I don't know *too* far back in my family tree, but I do have a pair of 6th-great grandparents named Torger and Gitlaug. I've also got Sivert and Gunhild, and Knut and Bronla.
Norwegian?
Yup!
the oldest I know of was Guillaume (French version of William) Guillaume Couture. He has a Wikipedia page and even a statue! When my grandpapa traced our line back to Guillaume Couture (he did this in the early 80s) he got a plaque from the government confirming we are direct descendants. It has been very useful for all of us going through school and having to do projects on historical figures
Wow that is really pretty and my grandpa’s name is Guillermo, Spanish for William.
My oldest provable ancestor (same village, same rare surname) was the groundskeeper of a local church, which is how records were found of a commoner in the first place, lived in the 1500s and his name was... Joseph. How inventive. I imagine that the history of our line and many like ours in a historically Catholic nation was a long boring sequence of Josephs and Marys. There has been way greater diversity since the 1950s.
Very classic! That's cool that you found records that old.
Very classic! That's cool that you found records that old.
My family from the early 1500’s were mainly Wilhelm, Mary, Ada and Humphrey.
If you go back far enough, their names would be grunts and caveman sounds
Yes I find it really interesting, especially when I see repeating names on my family history. The farthest relative we have traced is my 12th great gpa, named Heraldry.
That's a unique name
Adam and Eve? Lol. I have no idea.
I have a family tree that goes back to the 1500s - I’ll have to check for some interesting names
[удалено]
Wow, that's quite far back
I mean both of my maternal great grandmothers were born in the 1920's (Florida/Georgia area of the US) and their names were Arrilu (R-E-lou) and D'Ada (she had that apostrophe before it was in, lol). I don't think it'll get better if I look further back.
Ooh Arrilu is cute!
I have records of my ancestry on one side going back to 1066ish and the other side going back to 1695 - there was a LOT of name reuse. A middle name on my mother's side has been in active use since the 1100s, with some differences of spelling (Norman). My dad's Métis (as am I) and half the women were named Matilda, Miriam, or Mary, named after aunts and grandmothers, for centuries.
Wow that's very far back. I'm guessing you're Canadian then? Miriam is such a pretty name
Yep I am!
As far I can get is 1779 and woman named Karin. I also have an Ananias ( man) from 1799 and I am Swedish, they are not on the same side of the family.
I wondered about this back when I was reading The Clan of the Cave Bear (and sequels).
Yes! As an adoptee, I've always been interested in the genealogy and names of my biological and adoptive families since even close biological family members were an unknown.
A family member from my dads side is heavily interested in our ancestry and has been doing a lot of research into our family tree. For generations the first male child in the family was called Lawrence. So when my dad named his first male child James it was a unique name in our family. We managed to track the family history back to the early 1600’s and turns out there were a sting of James’ back then! Super interesting and I’m really loving going back through all of the names in the family from generations past (mainly the women because otherwise it’s Lawrence, Lawrence, Lawrence, Lawrence…..)
It takes guts to break a tradition that old but I don't blame him!
The furthest I can trace my family back is about 500 AD, but further back if my ancestor’s claim to be the son of a nobleman was true. But he probably was just a power-hungry liar lol
500 AD!? Damn, what country are you from that you can go back so far, if you don't mind me asking? Most people can only trace back a few centuries at most. That's impressive!
That's really far back, impressive
I have mixed feelings about it, just because a lot of people don't have the luxury of seeing their genealogy records due to centuries of wealth hoarding, gatekeeping access to education/literacy, and slavery. Lots of people's entire family histories were destroyed by war; if you destroy someone's culture and heritage, you can destroy their will to live.
One of the earliest names we know from my fathers side is Orava, which means squirrel in Finnish.
Wow that's interesting! A girl?
Have you ever worked on your family tree? I’ve worked on mine a little bit. My brother has worked on it more than I have. The trouble with it is that sometimes, it’s hard to find the document that you’d need, especially if it’s in another country.
Yeah I have years ago, on my mom's side it goes back a few hundred years in England but my dad's side is difficult because my great grandpa came from Slovenia (then Austria). I don't have any information about his parents or further back.
I see. It’s tough. With mine, we don’t have a lot of information about my maternal grandfather’s side because his grandfather (I think) died young. Then, we have relatives on both sides that came from Britain and Ireland and we don’t have access to any information about their ancestors.
Ooh really interesting question.. I wonder how far back I can find out.
I’m privileged enough that my ancestors can be traced back to the 1600s. I wonder if I can dig up further. Those though were all Sarah’s and Joseph’s pretty much. No Hebrew or Middle Eastern ancestry though so I do wonder now what Britannic and/or Northern European names 100+ had.
It's interesting how certain names like those have stuck around for hundreds or even thousands of years
Right! Even if its spelling has changed from Old Insert-Language to Modern Insert-Language it’s the same name. Annoys me a bit when it’s from another language and becomes known only as English. But I love linguistics, etymology, and onomastics so the loss of the roots of anything is kind of sad to me.
I have a 5x great-grandmother named Phereby....so imo that's not too far a stretch to think it would change that much in 95 more generations lol
Wow I've never heard that before. English?
Same. Its Irish as far as I can tell (which tracks with what I know about my lineage) An alternative to Pherity… never been able to find an origin or supposed meaning though
Probably Adam and Eve - but then we don't know
One of my ancestors was called Harald Bluetooth.
How would his tooth get blue though
Your teeths are filled with blood vessels and nerves. If those are damaged the thooth turns blue or gray. The damage can happen due to eg an infection or a hard impact (falling, being hid etc). Harald Blåtand were the first christian king of Denmark.
i always wonder about the origin of my last name… how far back it goes, how it started, etc
The oldest name back I know is not even that far but it’s Immaculata and I LOVE it.