Magnificent Find for Genealogists and Others Interested in Peculiar Names in the U.S.
I have just begun this book. What a find! Curiousities of Puritan Nomenclature (1880) by Charles W. Bardsley of the still-extant “Harleian Society” regarding genealogy and heraldry — witness their motto The Glory of Children are their Fathers, which is as spectacularly self-serving as it gets for a bunch of Fudds doing genealogy. But go grab the FREE book: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39284/39284-h/39284-h.htm
The first lines of the first section shed a mighty light on English nicknames, with the opening shot: “The Paucity of Names After the [Norman] Conquest.” The old English (indeed Old English) names were simply driven out of the language, and a very few Norman names caught on rapidly. And so for four hundred years there was a great winnowing of names, so that:
In every community of … Continue reading