Читать книгу Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History - Ryan Tubridy, Anthony Adolph - Страница 22

Scots families often followed strict rules about naming children. The usual pattern was as shown on this chart:

Naming patterns. The arrows indicate the person after whom the child was named.

If this practice was followed strictly, and you know the names of all the children in the family, you can work out what the grandparents’ names would have been. Unfortunately, you will seldom know for sure who the eldest son was, and the system was not followed perfectly: in some families, the eldest son was named after the maternal grandfather, and if a child with a particular family name died, a sibling born later might be given the same one.

Problems arose when two grandparents had the same name. If both grandfathers were called Roderick, did you name your second son Roderick, as well as the first? Sometimes no, sometimes yes, though in such cases the second Roderick might be given a completely different nickname.

Naming patterns mean that first names stayed in families, but could migrate down through female lines. Unusual forenames can provide clues to ancestry: the forename Sorley is very rare in Harris, and according to Bill Lawson pretty much everyone with that name is descended one way or another from Sorley MacAulay, one of two MacAulay brothers who settled at Greosabhagh in 1780.