RADICAL VIEWPOINT ABOUT NAMING BABIES?

A new friend told me that he thinks that children who are named after someone exactly but with the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. after the name are abused by the naming.  He feels that naming this way automatically puts too much expectation on the child, usually a boy, to follow in some ancestors footsteps.  He says it's usually rich and influential families who name their sons this way, leaving little room for fulfilling one's own interests and talents; if the ancestor was a tycoon so should the child.  He feels family pride is a detriment.

He was so sure of this opinion of his that I had to think about it.

I see what he means, I'm just not sure that he's right most of the time. That's because while naming this way is about class and culture - you could say tribal - I've found such children usually have nicknames that are rather cute and don't carry the burden of the descendant's name except on official forms in adulthood Some of their own friends don't even know that they are a 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th.  Also sometimes they choose to go through life with a second or third given name.

Then there's that there are families who are warm, loving, nurturing, and caring for their children and families who are not of all classes and cultures.

However, I did once know a man who was burdened by an authoritarian dad who was a star in the insurance business and disappointed in him because he got a Masters degree and became an English teacher!  Though making a comparatively paltry salary, all his friends growing up who "had" still accepted him because they all figured he didn't really have to work and lived off inheritance.

For the genealogist, while a father's son is a Jr.  And when the father dies, the son is no longer a Jr.  But if he has a son named after him that son is Jr.  A numbered name does not imply direct descent.  A nephew can easily become a second.  A grandchild a third.  Some of the families with this tendency seem to recycle given names!

C 2017-2025 Ancestry Worship -Genealogy BlogSpot

DANIEL MENDELSOHN : BOOK EXCERPT : THE LOST (A SEARCH FOR SIX OF SIX MILLION) on JEWISH NAMING PATTERNS

page 151

"I know that Ruchele had to have been born after September 3, 1923... I know this because Eastern European Jews only name their children after their dead... I and my four siblings are named after dead relatives, just as my grandfather and his six siblings were, and because of this practice people who are interested in Jewish genealogy have a remarkably reliable method of determining certain dates if the information is otherwise lacking... '

"I know for a fact that Shmiel's daughter Ruchele Jager had to have been born after the death of her father's and my grandfather's sister; The first Rachel Jager born in 1896, the doomed bride whose tragic and unexpected death, also horribly premature, would later become, over the course of many years, my families' greatest story, a mythic narrative at whose heart, or so I believe, stands an even older legend about closeness and distance, intimacy and violence, love and death, that first of all legends, first of all myths, about how easily we come to kill those to whom we are closest. '

(Daniel Mendelshohn is referring to CAIN and ABEL here, from the Old Testament/Torah. His book is masterful and, if he does nothing else in his life, this is an accomplishment of a lifetime.)

THE LOST
A search for six of six million
C 2006
Daniel Mendelsohn HarperCollins Publishers

SPAIN MAY CHANGE SURNAME TRADITION TO END SEXIST NAME BIAS

"Spain's Socialist government has found a new place to push for gender equality, seeking to erase all vestiges of male bias from the country's double-barreled last names.

Spaniards have two surnames, and under current law for registering babies, either the father's or the mother's can come first. Traditionally, however, it is the dad's and in cases of disagreement among the parents, the father's name automatically takes priority."

Read this news article now by clicking on the title of this post!