Names at the Red River Settlement
by Elizabeth CampbellAnother of the difficulties resulting from the now (fortunately) almost obsolete custom of “naming” was not only the duplicating but the quadruplicating of names in the one neighborhood. The people got over that part of the trouble by introducing the use of “nick-names,” derived either from personal characteristics or by prefixing or affixing some ancestral family name. This was well enough for the people themselves who knew locally “Black Sandy.” and “Red Sandy,” but since people at a distance did not know these fine shades of distinction, the primitive post-office or the mail-carrier confronted “confusion worse confounded” when a letter came addressed to a name owned by half a dozen different people in the parish. The difficulty was generally solved by some one of the name opening it, and if it was not for him he passed it on till the right party was reached.
- Rev. R. G. MacBeth, Red River Settlers in Real Life p. 59
MacBeth here touches on a Scottish custom that is still practiced in some families, but not nearly to the extent that it used to throughout Scotland and into Scottish colonies. The Scottish naming practice is something that genealogists know about and find a great aid to sorting out family trees. But as MacBeth mentions here, and particularly in an isolated colony like Red River, that boon can rapidly turn into confusion!
Many settlers had large families. If there were four sons in John McKay’s family, each of them married and having one son, and each of them following the Scottish naming practice, then right away we would have the original John, and at four other Johns. Scottish naming practice dictated that the eldest son be named after his paternal grandfather, the eldest daughter after her maternal grandmother, the second son after his maternal grandfather, the second daughter after her paternal grandmother….
Tags: Genealogy, names, Red River Genealogy, The Rev. R. G. MacBeth
