Читать книгу Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History - Ryan Tubridy, Anthony Adolph - Страница 21

Scots rarely used these before the nineteenth century. When the custom spread, Scots sometimes used the names of wealthy patrons or benefactors as middle names, but more normally used existing family forenames and surnames, thereby helping identify the wider ramifications of the family tree. Walter Hooks (1847-1915), pattern-maker of Ardrossan, Ayrshire (see pp. 50-1), for example, called one daughter Mary MacClandish Hooks, the middle name being her mother’s maiden name, and another Sarah Boag Hooks, Sarah Boag having been the full name of his father’s third wife.

Those names were usually bestowed informally: when men appear in records such as tax lists or ships’ manifests with a middle name, this will often be the father’s forename, put there to tell different people apart. John Donald MacDonald and John Neil MacDonald probably weren’t baptized with their middle names – they were just the sons of Donald MacDonald and Neil MacDonald respectively.