Celebrate Your Name Week is nearly over for this year. Have you been following along? If not, it’s ok to backtrack and catch up on what you have missed. Genealogists can use the ideas and concepts presented as part of CYNW as motivation to continue their genealogy research in new directions. Everyone can have fun learning more about their name, and the names of their friends and family.
Celebrate Your Name Week(CYNW) takes place between Sunday, March 6, 2011, and Saturday March 12, 2011. Each day is dedicated to a particular way to celebrate your name. Today is “Middle Name Pride” Friday. Most of us tend to neglect or ignore our middle names. When you introduce yourself to someone new, you probably tell them your first name. If you are making a professional connection, you usually give out your first and last name. There really isn’t a situation where people are supposed to go by their middle names, though.
You might be able to rattle off the middle names of your closest relatives. Do you happen to know the middle names of your closest friends? It is unlikely that you know the middle name of any of your coworkers. Jerry Hill, the founder of Celebrate Your Name Week, suggests that today is a good day to tell at least three people what your middle name is.
Be brave, and share that middle name, even if it is one that you dislike. Someone you share it with might find your unusual middle name to be delightful. You may gain a whole new perspective on your middle name. If you have a common middle name, it might be fun to find out how many of your friends or coworkers have the same middle name as you do, spelled the exact same way.
Genealogists can learn a lot if they happen to know the middle name of an ancestor. Typing your ancestor’s first name and surname into the search engine of one of the genealogy websites is likely to get you a long list of names to search through. If you can plug in your ancestors middle name into the search engine, you can potentially narrow down your search quite a bit. This might save you some valuable research time.
Middle names are a good starting point if you are interested in learning more about your family history. Many families will name children in ways that honor the child’s grandparents. A girl might be given the first name of her mother’s mother. Her middle name might be the first name of her father’s mother. In my family, one of my brothers has a first name that matches the first name of my father’s father. The same brother was given a middle name that matches the first name of my mother’s father. Some families will give a daughter the same first name as her grandmother, and will use the grandmother’s maiden name for the middle name of the daughter. This can give a genealogist some clues about how different ancestors are related to each other.
Image by Bryan Brenneman on Flickr