Sibling names | Anthroponymy | Forum

Ah alas my results were inaccurate! This does not surprise me though as I have a Scottish name (Rhona), my brother's is Irish (Liam) and my sister's is French (Avril).

The site did cast up some Scottish suggestions for my siblings names such as Angus and Catriona. Rhona and Catriona sound awful together (depending on how one pronounces Catriona) but I Iike Angus and Rhona

I know three sets of all girl siblings named Fiona and Jennifer so out of interest I looked them up but again found the results to be inaccurate.

It is indeed fun website!

From "calculated through user submissions", I presume this is a modern snapshot, so interesting, but not very useful. Sibling naming, notably unusuals and patterns, offers an occaisionally critical tool in genealogy research, plus a correction for the preceding and an interesting social window in historic context. Does anyone know of relevant studies?

kb

Thanks for the response and the very interesting paper, which I've copied on to someone who will also appreciate it. Similar pattern naming is claimed for German immigrants to USA and seems to apply for about 2-3 generations for the Palatinate ones, perhaps quenched by pressure to anglicize. One has to remember the language situation here too. It was approaching 1800 before the first English language newspaper in a northern Maryland town on the primary immigration route - all German before that and primarily German speaking enclaves persisted for another half century.

Genealogy research is difficult and a Bayesian approach often offers strategy guidance in iffy fields. Your paper makes me wonder whether a tool could be devised to assess probabilities of connections using name patterning. In both my parent's lines, I bridged gaps by a broadside surname search, assessing frequencies for the given names of the known starting families, identifying most probable target families, and re-assessing using probabilities conditioned on dead child replacement, aunt/uncle collaterals etc. Naming patterns as in the Scottish and German would be a factor for a tool, as would socially driven fashion from historic and locale context.

Thanks again.