All the different family surnames

Birth certificate always have parents names. It doesnt ask if they're married. I believe marriage is a religious tradition.

I do notice women these days are less likely to change their name with the argument they are not property or just for professional career reasons.

It becomes even more complicated when families use both parents surnames, 2 of my GC are double barrelled.I wonder what happens if they then added another name when they have children.

I have two grandkids with double names too Tanith it’s awkward isn’t it I think we should all just keep out birth name that’s what I d do if I had my time again

It used to be considered ‘posh’ to have a double-barrelled surname.

Bit like personalised car number plates.

Now, anyone has them, so no longer special, as with so many things nowadays.

When I see a double barrelled name I think of the Coronation St couple where she thought it made her something she clearly wasn,t.Batters y-Brown…..lol
I,m sure that put a lot of people off double barrelling their names.
My ancestry issue is that my original name is Irish and so many families have the same Christian names it’s impossible to find one branch of a family from many I can go back to 2 x gps on my mums side.My dad had one Scottish granny and I. can follow them to the early 1700,s in the western islands .
Keeps my head occupied trying to get further back though I don’t spend as much time on my tree as I used to

My great grandfather was Italian and married an Irish woman.Name was Carlos Rocciocielli

In Iceland, daughters surnames are their mother's name, with the addition of the word daughter, and sons are their father's name, and the word son.
Perhaps you recall a broadcaster called Magnus Magnusson.

Her name was Alice Pickett.Sadly Ireland kept all birth records in a central office that burned down

macaydia

The Catholic Church, at least, has fireproof vaults where they keep Baptismal records. If a person is married in the Catholic Church, that record is added to their Baptismal record. People have used these records in the past to trace ancestry, before the advent of the Internet.

I think if women kept their names on marriage, it would be easier to trace back your ancestry.
Children don't necessarily need to have double barrelled names either, it makes sense to choose one surname as a 'family name' as in either partner's name...
Look at the way some same sexed couples do it.
It is also sensible to choose the rarer name to prevent it dying out.

I had great difficulty trying to trace my family tree. So many had the same surnames on both sides and everyone seemed to be called John or Margaret. I gave up. We're just too boring!

There are still birth, marriage and death certificates, as well as various censuses, so even double barrelled or no name changes should stop family trees being traced now or in the future, and in fact it may be easier as lots of records are now online and there’s companies around to help, for a price.

Aveline

I had great difficulty trying to trace my family tree. So many had the same surnames on both sides and everyone seemed to be called John or Margaret. I gave up. We're just too boring!

🤣🤣🤣🤣

My husband has a very,very common surname which means when I get back before memory kicks in there are dozens of people all born at the same time in the same area. Very annoying. I have got him back to the eighteenth century more by luck and female surnames we know of but I am pretty stuck before that. Mine are much easier to trace.

My paternal grandfather's name is Maltese, it was the one I grew up with and so often mispronounced. Going back on that line, lots of Italian surnames, some hailed from Sicily I believe. My grandfather's birth certificate is in Italian. My mother's maiden name is French, my maternal grandfather's people came from Alsace and I've only found out a couple of years ago that they were Jewish, sadly after my mother died, she would have loved to have known that. She thought at one time they might have been Huguenot, because there was no evidence that they were catholic. My grandfather, my mother told me, never went to church with them, my grandmother's family being Irish and therefor catholic. Other than that the names were pretty standard, even the Irish side of the family didn't have particularly stand out out Irish names, until I got back a couple of generations, although I do know they originally came from Limerick.

Going back into 19th century records for England, it was interesting to see how often a child would be given the mother's maiden name as a first name, a way to keep the mother's family name going, it puzzled me at first to find these strange first names, but I think it was a fairly common practice.

I have one branch of the family that came from North Devon and their church records went way back. I've been to many places where there are family graves, Kent, North Devon and around Great Malvern, where my paternal grandmother's line originated.

I love genealogy it's been an enduring interest for the past 20 or so years, although like everyone I've come up against brick walls. Thank God for cousins, even ones I didn't know I had, they've given me so much information over the years. All those dead people would probably have had ten pink fits if they knew how much future generations would be poking around in their past sometimes digging up things they'd have rather kept hidden

I have a very common surname and tracing ancestors and needed the parish records or census to trace them even the 2 or more families of the same name. Christian names run in families lots of John, Richard, Robert and Charles in mine.

Macaydia

Birth certificate always have parents names. It doesnt ask if they're married. I believe marriage is a religious tradition.

I do notice women these days are less likely to change their name with the argument they are not property or just for professional career reasons.

Is that the case now?

I had difficulty finding out who my great grandfather was because his name was not on my grandmother's birth certificate, although my grandmother had what seemed to be a surname as one of her middle names. Unfortunately, it was and is such a common name it was difficult to find out much about him. Although Banns of Marriage were called, he never married my great-grandmother.
Did he die? Did he scarper?

My father had an unusual surname and his family had lived in the same area for hundreds of years. Tracing that family tree was easy because the church records were excellent.
It’s so much worse if the church records are patchy, the surname is common and everybody was called the same few names. Which John Smith is this? The father or uncle or son? Some families used the same names for more than one child and some were still having children when their older ones were also having children.
It’s a fascinating and addictive interest.

I often wish I had kept my pre marriage name . A few years ago a long lost friend tried to contact me , she had no idea whether I had married or not - I had.
She found me by knowing I had a brother and sought him out. He contacted me with her address. Without having a brother we probably would not have been reunited!
One thing that really irritates me is a close family member ( on my husbands side) addresses my birthday cards as
Mrs P. .......... My first name does not begin with P!!!! Its quite enough adopting my DHs surname- I dont want his first name too!!! Drives me mad, I am not an add on to my DH I am ME and have my own first name.
It so old fashioned, unnecessary and infuriating.

Sorry if I hijacked the post!!!

I have the same problem as paddyanne when it comes to my Irish ancestry. Once they arrive in this country, between 1800 - 1850, it isn't too bad but before then.

There is also the problem of illegitimacy, we do not know who the father of one of my grandfather's was, because he was born illegitimate and his birth certificate only includes his mother's name.

Macaydia

Birth certificate always have parents names. It doesnt ask if they're married. I believe marriage is a religious tradition.

I do notice women these days are less likely to change their name with the argument they are not property or just for professional career reasons.

Marriage is not just a religious imposition and is universal deep into prehistory. Many animals and birds form lifelong pair bonds

The pupose of marriage/pairbonding was to enable the male contribuor to the formation of a child to be reasonably sure that he was actually the father, of the child he was acknowledging as his. In animals, where there is no pair bonding the male usually plays no part in the nurture of the animal.

Ceremonies to publicly acknowledge that an exclusive pair bond had taken place wer to enable people to know who was still in the pair bnding pool and who was not.

Now, of course we have DNA analysis, but this was only possible once someones genes could be analysed and I seem to remember that the use of DNA analysis for matching human DNA has only been possible since the 1990s.

I’m getting married again this year and when we saw the registrar we had to give the names of our parents and their occupations for the marriage certificate. My husband to be couldn’t remember his fathers middle name. It turns out when we checked he didn’t have one. His mother now deceased had the same first name of Mary as her sister. She used her middle name as her preferred name. Why would you give two children in the same family the same first name! They were a highly religious family.

I suppose they used both names for eg Mary Jane & Mary Rose, which has become common again now, although hyphenated to make sure everyone knows to use both.