Record keepers have always had a specific problem—names often aren’t enough. We tend to think of a name as the same as, or at least a label for, an identity. Clerks, ministers, sextons and anyone else whose job included keeping track of people knew differently. A census enumerator did not care that there were ten men with the same name in the same town. Those names were simply recorded and that was that. The information that we use to tell them apart now was simply recorded because it was supposed to be recorded. What about those people who created records that needed to be linked to a single person accurately? What extra information did they record? As genealogists we need to pay attention to the trails of breadcrumbs that those clerks left for themselves so that they could navigate through the forests of Smiths, Joneses and Andersons that they inhabited.
Two Names Wasn’t Enough
A man who appears in a set of records, sometimes with his middle initial and sometimes without, might be two different men. It might just be the clerk’s way of telling the two apart. The first man got recorded without a middle initial when there was no need to use more than his first and last names to label him as the man who was involved. Only later was there a problem when another man of the same name moved into the area or came of legal age. That second man’s middle initial was dropped into the record as the all important breadcrumb.
Generations and Geography
I’ve been researching a man with a locally common name. Sometimes the name appears followed by “Jr,” sometimes by “Sr,” and sometimes the name is unaccompanied. How many men do I have? It could be two, but it could be three if it is significant that the name often appears without a “Jr” or “Sr.” It actually looks like the correct number is four. There were two men identified with the generational titles and two others who were kept apart by using places. One “John of the mill” and the other “John of the bridge” can be found in the records. In other records these same men were identified as “John son of George” and “John of the bridge.” That last one, “John of the bridge,” seems to be the same man who was once identified as “John son of John.” Now we’ve reached a new type, relational breadcrumbs, and a new problem, crisscrossing systems of breadcrumbs. Different clerks identified these men in different ways and the conversion between them must be found if we are to make sense of it.
Marriage, Work and Birth
Marital status can be subtly used as a breadcrumb. I’ve also seen a record in which a woman’s name was sometimes preceded by Mrs. and other times by Miss. The author of the record realized that the difference between the two women with the same name could be implied by always specifying whether the person being mentioned was married or not—another breadcrumb.
Reading about “Robert Jones the cobbler” when others in the records are listed without occupations might be a clue that the clerk thought he might need that occupational breadcrumb to tell him apart from another Robert Jones. If that was the case, one needs to be wary of other Robert Joneses that might turn up and cause confusion.
Some cultures had very specific problems. In Scandinavia, where nearly everyone was identified by their own given name and their father’s given name, there was a clear danger of confusing one Lars Andersson for another. Names with all the specificity of “William son of John” were nowhere near specific enough, even in a small village or a sparsely populated swathe of countryside. Names in the records needed to be accompanied by birth dates and birth places. At first glance it seems wonderful that the extra effort was made to record all that information every time a record was made, then one realizes that it was 100% necessary, and, without it, the ministers who made those records would have had no idea who was who within a year or two. That birth information made vital trails of breadcrumbs through the records.
Hansel and Gretel’s trail of breadcrumbs may have disappeared before they could use it, but those clerical breadcrumbs are still there to be followed. They give us clues to the problems the clerks knew about and were trying to avoid, and they give us a at least a tenuous trail of identity to follow as we research.