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pipi_k

(21,020 posts)
3. Frustrating problem
Wed Jan 21, 2015, 09:50 AM
Jan 2015

For those of us of French Canadian descent as well.

Often, children in the same nuclear family had the same names, albeit often hyphenated.



As well as the custom of naming children after saints, parents in New France and Lower Canada also liked to use hyphenated double-first names (e.g. Jean-Baptiste; Marie-Madeleine) and might also choose to name all the boys (or girls) in the family with identical first names, using the second given names in the hyphenated double first name as a means of differentiation (e.g. Jean-Baptiste, Jean-Paul, Jean-François; Marie-Marguerite, Marie-Charlotte, Marie-Madeleine). Confusion results when documents use only one-half of a hyphenated double-first name in a document (e.g. either Jean or Baptiste rather than Jean-Baptiste); or when a given name and a middle name are mistaken for a hyphenated double-first name. [2] Difficulties are compounded when parents reuse a given name for a newborn child after an older sibling with the same name dies. Moreover, families in Quebec and Lower Canada were partial to using the same given names over and over, christening children after their grandparents or godparents (who were often aunts or uncles). As a result it is not uncommon to find several individuals of similar age, living in the same community or parish, bearing identical given names and surnames.



I've run into that problem lots of times in my own family tree


http://people.ucalgary.ca/~hdevine/naming.htm

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