> In English parish records one usually can find the burial record for the > first child of that name before the baptism of the second. That said, one > ancestral family had an Elizabeth (1826), another Elizabeth (1829), and an > Eliza (1830) baptised. Eliza is my great-grandmother, and I expected to > find the burial records for both her sisters named Elizabeth. The first > Elizabeth died in September 1828, but the second Elizabeth married in > 1854, and died some time between the 1891 and 1901 census returns. I'm seen any number of families with both an Elizabeth and an Eliza. It is clear to me that they were regarded as completely separate names. With regard to the original query, I've occasionally seen families where a name was reused after a father remarried. Presumably, for the second wife, her step-children "didn't count". Regards Steven Gibbs Bedford