Unusual names
We have some unusual names in our family tree. For example, we have two girls called Thomasin and two called Tabitha from Yorkshire,
Shadrack Field from Somerset, Philadelphia Etherington from Kent, Skelton Hodgson from Cumberland and six men called Preston Pickles from
Yorkshire. Names like these make the search more interesting, but can also make the search easier and give you more confidence in the
accuracy of your findings.
Rarer names like Tabitha and Thomasin are great as any record you find with that name is likely to be for the person you are looking for.
But they also tell you a lot about the family. According to the
Oxford Names Companion, Tabitha is an
Aramaic name equivalent to the Greek Dorcas and popular with Puritan and Dissenter families. Thomasin is the female form of Thomas,
was once popular with Christian families, and has seen a recent revival in its contracted form of Tamsin.
Skelton is a fairly common family name in Cumberland and Yorkshire, but it is very rare as a given name. There are Skelton families in the same villages
in Cumberland as my Hodgson descendants and Skelton Hodgson also has two near relations with Skelton as a second name. It is likely that a women with the
surname Skelton married into the Hodgson family. Perhaps Skelton Hodgson's mother Mary was born Mary Skelton?
Finding a family full of people with the same name is not so helpful. The six Preston Pickles were all born in the villages of
Grassington, Linton and Hebden in Wharfedale between 1783 and 1876.
As they also have parents, siblings and children with similar names, it was hard to follow the parish records to sort out exactly who was who.
According to the Oxford Names Companion, Pickles is an old English name for "someone who lived by a small field or paddock" and
Preston is also old English and derived from the words for priest and enclosure or settlement. Preston is normally a surname so it's likely
that we will also find some ancestors in that branch with Preston as their family name.
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Handwriting and transcription errors
Now that our search is reaching back into the 17th and 18th centuries I've had to learn to read the handwriting that you find in older
documents. The limited vocabulary helps—the documents are mostly lists of names, dates and simple facts—and I've also found
some excellent reference documents online.
For 'court hand' and 'chancery hand' I use the illustrations in
Court-hand restored. As well as basic tables of letter forms the book also has lists
of common contractions of names. This book was first written in 1778, which goes to show that this is not a new problem.
For 'secretary hand' I use this illustration from about.com,
the guide at Scottish Handwriting.com and this
illustration.
For 'copperplate' and 'Spencerian' scripts I actually use pages from an old school handwriting textbook, but also this
illustration.
Another advantage of learning to read these scripts is that you can check the accuracy of online indexes. The difficulty of interpreting
the handwriting means that these indexes contain many transcription errors. So when I find a useful record in an
index published at Ancestry.co.uk or a similar genealogy site, I always check the scanned image of the
original document.
For example, here is part of a census document and the list of names given in the index. Do you think the names are transcibed correctly?
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Waterworth origins
In the past, few people moved far from where they were born, leaving many family names concentrated in particular parts of the
country. Knowing the origin and distribution of a family name can help you focus your search on the right areas.
The Ancestry.co.uk website now has a great feature that allows you to
search for basic facts about a family name. The results include the origin of the
name and the distribution of the name in the 1891 census.
We've know for some time that the origin of the Waterworth surname was in Lancashire. The map generated by Ancestry.co.uk shows that the name
was still very much concentrated in Lancashire and Yorkshire in 1891. We suspect that although we have spread out a little bit, there will still
be many more Waterworths in those counties today.
The maps also show some surprising distributions. For example, Anderson is a name from Scotland and the North of England, but my Anderson ancesters
come from North Kent. The 1891 distribution maps for England and Wales
and for Scotland do show that half the Anderson families are in Scotland,
and most of the rest are Lancashire, Yorkshire, Durham, Northumberland and London. But Kent has the next highest concentration with 993 Anderson
families.
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