You'll all have seen my post from the Message Board anyway, but just as a reminder, I am 8/8ths Scots, all 208 direct ancestors unearthed so far being born in Scotland. I have 2234 couples in my tree married between 1750 and 1900, and I reckon that something like half of them followed the naming pattern to some extent. My mother's family is from west and central Scotland and my father's from eastern Scotland. I agree that it isn't an infallible way of working out who the previous generation were, but in my families it is certainly prevalent enough to provide very strong evidence, and I have used it in this way. For instance I found two Grizel Leslies in my father's side, both born in the parish of Rothes in 1757. One of them was the daughter of Joseph and the other was the daughter of William. One married Alexander Duncan, son of John Duncan, and they had sons named John, Joseph, Alexander and James, but no William. The other married Alexander Cruickshank, son of Robert, and had sons Robert, William, James and Alexander, but no Joseph. So it wasn't exactly difficult to deduce which was which. As a bonus, the mother of No 2 was Janet and her mother-in-law was Elizabeth; and her daughters were Janet, Elizabeth and Isobel. Many of my mother's relatives followed the tradition exactly for several generations. Anne ________________________________ From: Adrian Bruce <abruce@madasafish.com> To: angus@rootsweb.com Sent: Saturday, 15 December 2012, 21:06 Subject: [ANGUS] Prevalence of naming pattern? A thread on the Message Board for Angus leads me to ask out of curiosity - how many of your Scots families follow the classic Scots naming pattern? My view has always been that you should use ancestry to deduce a naming pattern, not a naming pattern to deduce ancestry. No harm in using it to define priorities in a search, but it's not evidence. My personal experience has been that I'm 1/8th Scots (one G-grandfather from Dundee) and _if_ that's a representative percentage, of the 751 families in my database, 93 would be Scots. Well, I've seen just two of those families follow a naming pattern. One was a family into which my relative married, so the pattern was before they arrived. The other came from California - the maternal grandfather was Scots, but they got the order of the first two daughters wrong. So call it one-and-a-half families. As I said on the board, the pattern unquestionably exists in _some_ areas and eras and I'd sort of got the idea that it would be stronger in the Gaelic areas.  However, a later post said that that something like half of Forfarian's families on both coasts follow the pattern. So - have I just got a contrary bunch (from Dundee but also coming down from Dunkeld)? In a completely unscientific survey - what's the feeling on how many of your Scots families from wherever follow the pattern? Cheers Adrian Bruce ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to ANGUS-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message