Name changing ? (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Monday, July 29, 2013, 12:45 (3950 days ago) @ heatherblockley

Thats fine Heather, no harm done but thanks for your post.

Re you suggesting there being two Thomas' in Joyford; yes this is possible altho your mention of one also being referred to as Martin is interesting and deserves further investigation/understanding. However I must say I'd got the impression from your posts, sorry if I'm wrong, that as Alfred was born (or at least registered..?) in London then that was the area we were looking at - hence my speculative post yesterday which I hope was of some help to you.

May I ask in what record the name Martin appears, this seems important to me ?. In my FH travels I've seen people's forenames apparently change thro time, I dont think it was that unusual, sometimes for convenience wrt children. This also occurred if a son was Christened "as usual" with their traditional family name, perhaps Thomas in your case, yet in subsequent Census forms etc it was clear they normally used his second name presumably to avoid confusion with the elder Thomas or even Thomases already within the family. This practice even reflects some foreign cultures, albeit coincidentally; when at Polytechnic I found some Arabs will have several names, but no "set" first name, sometimes they varied wrt which name they used, I recall some confusion when students returned for another year in the course but registered under a different combination of the same names !

I've also seen examples of men clearly baptised with a particular single Christian name; yet later in life they "suddenly" also adopt another middle name. In my case our Harry was baptised, married and buried a Harry, these PRs being echoed by the various Civic Registrations. However during the 1911 Census he "suddenly" also adopted his father's name as a second name, which was the family's traditional one to boot. We have no idea why this happened, it wasn't to remember a recent bereavement for example, his father being alive & well. In our case we wonder if Harry knew (at the 1911 Census) he'd be joining the Army before war broke out and perhaps was worried about his future in the trenches so wanted to somehow reflect his father's name, altho thankfully he survived the war. Unlikely but perhaps possible too, we just don't know ???