First name

“ The first name being the important one, the others may be added, subtracted, multiplied, or divided, with perfect freedom. A wife may or may not add her husband's name to her own; the eldest son takes some of the father's family names, the second son some of the mother's, saints' names are sprinkled in to suit the taste, and no confusion is produced, because the first name is the only one in common use. Each may, if he pleases, carry all his ancestors on his visiting-card, without any inconvenience except the cost of pasteboard.
Fayal exhibits another point of courtesy to be studied. ”

“ E. H. Y. will find the question, surname or sirname, slightly touched upon in my English Surnames (3rd edit., vol. i. p. 13.) , and argued at length in the Literary Gazette for Nov. 1842, in a correspondence originating out of a notice of the first edition of my book. I think the balance of evidence is in favour of surname; that is, a name superadded to the personal or baptismal appellation, which applies with equal propriety to the sobriquets given to monarchs and distinguished men, and to the hereditary designations of people of humble rank. ”

“ when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; ”

“ With many families it is a convenient custom to christen the sons by the mother’s maiden name in addition to their first individual name; but the whole conversion of surnames into Christian names is exclusively English, and is impossible on the Continent, as state and church both refuse to register what is not recognized as in use. Of English surnames we need say nothing; they have been fully treated of in other works, and as any one may be used in baptism, at any time, the mention of them would be endless. ”

“ A person who wishes to change his existing first name or middle name shall make an application therefor to a local registrar in charge of the locality where his name is entered in a household register in conformity with the law on civil registration. ”

“ Kemble was the first to call attention to the fact that very many of the names of places in England, as disclosed by the forms in which these names appear in ancient charters, consist of a personal name in a patronymic form. Some of these names consist simply of a nominative plural in ingas, as Æscingas, the sons or descendants of Æsc, others of a genitive plural in inga, with ton, ham, &c., appended, as in Billingatun, the town of the Billings, i.e. sons or descendants of Billa. ”

“ Among other names apparently from women are Ella, Eva, and Louisa, in Suffolk Surnames. Of these, the first is a regular Saxon man's name, and the second is, I doubt not, the same, corresponding with Eafa found in Eafingas, and with Eafha, the name of a Mercian alderman. Louisa I should suppose to be the name Louis with a Romanic, perhaps Spanish, but not female, ending. [Pg 217]
INDEX OF NAMES.
∵All foreign names are printed in italic type, with the letters distinguishing their nationality within parentheses after them, thus— (D.) Dutch; (Dan.) Danish; (F.) French; (G.) German; (I.) Italian ”

“ Footnotes 1.The Bohemian name Ántonia is strongly accented on the first syllable, like the English name Anthony, and the i is, of course, given the sound of long e. The name is pronounced Anʹ-ton-ee-ah. ”

“ Our first words of explanation informed me that my family name was known to her by repute. Who do you think she was? The eldest daughter of my uncle and yours—Andrew Vanstone. I had often heard my poor mother in past years speak of her brother Andrew, and I knew of that sad story at Combe-Raven. But our families, as you are aware, had always been estranged, and I had never seen my charming cousin before. She has the dark eyes and hair, and the gentle, retiring manners that I always admire in a woman. ”

“ The terror of seeing him as she saw him now was not the terror she had felt when her eyes first lighted on him—an apparition in the moon-light, a specter in the ghostly Hall. This time she could struggle against the shock; she could feel the depth of her own fear.
He passed her, and stopped in the middle of the room. Magdalen ventured near enough to him to be within reach of his voice as he muttered to himself. She ventured nearer still, and heard the name of her dead husband fall distinctly from the sleep-walker's lips. ”

“ Some travellers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame; and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame. ”

“ The study of the origin of family names is at the same time quite simple and very difficult. Its simplicity consists in the fact that surnames can only come into existence in certain well-understood ways. Its difficulty is due to the extraordinary perversions which names undergo in common speech, to the orthographic uncertainty of our ancestors, to the frequent coalescence of two or more names of quite different Origin, and to the multitudinous forms which one single name can assume, such forms being due to local pronunciation, accidents of spelling, date of adoption, and many minor causes. ”

“ Murray and Bessie came to their senses about the same moment also, and there they all four stood and looked at one another, ashamed and confused, yet happy.
It took the man of the world to recover first.
“Well, my son,” he said in a pleased voice, “you seem to have done something worthy of your family name at last!”
“Yes, father, isn’t it great? But everything’s going to be different from now on. Oh, Boy! Mother Chapparelle! I just realized. I haven’t got to give myself up after all, have I? I’m not a murderer! She’s alive! And she loves me!” ”

“ In order to avoid the use of people's own names, parents are sometimes named after their children, uncles and aunts after their nephews and nieces, and so forth. The common custom of naming parents after their children seems to arise from a reluctance to mention the real names of persons addressed or directly referred to. When it is deemed necessary that a man's real name should be kept secret, it is often customary, as we have seen, to call him by a surname or nickname. ”

“ Claritas patriæ.—Greatness of name in the father oft-times helps not forth, but overwhelms the son; they stand too near one another. The shadow kills the growth: so much, that we see the grandchild come more and oftener to be heir of the first, than doth the second: he dies between; ”

“ Some, once so popular that they scarce gave identity to the bearer, are now all but obsolete, while numerous appellations at present generally current were then utterly unknown. There are surnames familiar to our ears whose root as a Christian name is now passed out of knowledge; while, on the other hand, many a Christian name now daily upon our lips has no surname formed from it to tell of any lengthened existence. The fact is, that while our surnames, putting immigration aside, have been long at a standstill, we have ever been and are still adding to our stock of baptismal names. ”

“ Where be thy Brothers?
Where be thy two Sonnes? Wherein dost thou Ioy?
Who sues, and kneeles, and sayes, God saue the Queene?
Where be the bending Peeres that flattered thee?
Where be the thronging Troopes that followed thee?
Decline all this, and see what now thou art.
For happy Wife, a most distressed Widdow:
For ioyfull Mother, one that wailes the name:
For one being sued too, one that humbly sues:
For Queene, a very Caytiffe, crown'd with care:
For she that scorn'd at me, now scorn'd of me:
For she being feared of all, now fearing one:
For she commanding all, obey'd of none. ”

“ At the first word from his son’s voice the father stiffened in his chair and grew alert, listening with all his senses keen. As the boy went on an icy thrill went round his heart. What had Murray done now? A murderer? There had never been a murderer in the Van Rensselaer family to his knowledge. He tried to rise, but his muscles would not obey him. He found himself suddenly weak.
Murray’s voice was going on haltingly. He seemed to be struggling with deep emotion.
“I thought I wanted you to know that I loved Bessie! I’ve always loved her, only she grew out of my life. ”

“ Webb continued,
"One thousand dollars a year may easily compensate for an ugly name; and even if we do not choose to give the child a middle name, which is optional with us, she will not have to be called by her Christian name long; for after a girl is in her teens, she gets the title of her surname. ”

“ Who could speak the dreadful words, while the first tears were wet on their cheeks, while the first pang of separation was at its keenest in their hearts, while the memory of the funeral was not a day old yet? Not their last friend left; not the faithful woman whose heart bled for them. ”

“ One by one, the last words of the dead man fastened themselves more and more firmly on her attention. The unrelieved solitude, the unbroken silence, helped their influence on her mind and opened it to those very impressions of past and present which she was most anxious to shun. As she reached the melancholy lines which closed the letter, she found herself—insensibly, almost unconsciously, at first—tracing the fatal chain of events, link by link backward, until she reached its beginning in the contemplated marriage between Magdalen and Francis Clare. ”

“ In Scotland and in the north of England, the paternal grandfather and grandmother have namesakes in the eldest son and daughter, then comes the turn of the grand-parents on the mother’s side, then of the parents themselves, after which fancy may step in. In Germany the same practice prevails as regards the two eldest; and likewise in the south of France, where the child, whatever its sex, bears the grandfather’s name, thus accounting for various uncouth feminines; but though thus christened, the two eldest children are never so called, but always by the diminutive of their surname. ”

“ There is another point connected with family portraits that has given me occasion of thought and speculation; and that is, the way in which those [230] children who are named after an ancestor or ancestress sometimes, I do not say often or always, but certainly sometimes, do in a very remarkable manner receive the stamp of the features of that ancestor after whom named. This has nothing to do with the naming of the child at baptism because of a supposed resemblance, for in very young infants none such can be traced, but the likeness grows in the child to the person whose name it bears. ”

“ In the study of family names we come across very much the same phenomena as in dealing with other words. They are subject to the same phonetic accidents and to the distortions of folk-etymology, being "altered strangely to significative words by the common sort, who desire to make all to be significative" (Camden, Remains concerning Britain) . Doublets and homonyms are of frequent occurrence, and the origin of some names is obscured by the well-meaning efforts of early philologists. It might be expected that a family name would by its very nature tend to preserve its original form. ”

“ The invention of original names usually takes place in the early stages of a people’s history, for a preference soon arises for established names, already borne by kindred, and as the spoken tongue drifts away, from the primitive form, the proper name becomes a mere appellative, with the original meaning forgotten, and often with a new one incorrectly applied to it. ”

“ Harvey gave his order to the disdainful waiter and then settled back in his chair for the first deliberate look around the room in quest of his wife.
Their eyes met. She had turned halfway round in her chair and was looking at him with wide-open, unbelieving eyes. He felt himself suddenly tied hand and foot to the chair. Now that he had found her he could do no more than stare at her in utter bewilderment. He had come tilting at windmills.
The flush deepened in her cheek as she turned her attention to the dessert that had just been set down before her. ”

“ The majority derive their origin from places or districts of limited dimensions, and to enumerate them would be an interminable and very thankless task. MR. L. has therefore judiciously determined to exercise his discretion on this class of cases. Nor are the names derived from Christian names generally worth insertion, for every Christian name has, in some form, been converted into a surname, either with or without alteration. ”

“ There are a few Old German names, mostly of women, in Mam and Mum. And there are also two [Pg 156] Old Frankish women's names, Mamma and Momma (apparently overlooked by Foerstemann) , in the Pol. Irm. It seems difficult to take these names as from anything else than the widely-spread word signifying mother. In an age when names sat much more lightly than they do now, one might fancy such a word superseding a woman's original name. I can even conceive the possibility of such a name, its origin having somewhat passed out of sight, being given in a masculine form to a son. ”

“ In dealing with surnames we begin after the Conquest, for the simple reason that there were no surnames before. Occasionally an important person has come down in history with a nickname, e.g. Edmund Iron-side, Harold Harefoot, Edward the Confessor; but this is exceptional, and the Anglo-Saxon, as a rule, was satisfied with one name. It is probable that very many of the names in use before the Conquest, whether of English or Scandinavian origin, were chosen because of their etymological meaning, e.g. ”

“ This vista of varieties would lead us far; but it is enough to notice, nonsense apart, that the most ordinary English surnames have become unique in their social significance; they stand for the man rather than the race or the origins. Even when they are most common they are not communal. What we call the family name is not now primarily the name of the family. The family itself, as a corporate conception, has already faded into the background, and is in danger of fading from the background. In short, our Christian names are not the only Christian things that we may lose. ”