On Sunday, May 22, 2016 at 10:51:27 AM UTC-4, taf wrote: > On Sunday, May 22, 2016 at 5:28:16 AM UTC-7, Kathy Becker wrote: > > > > Hence the confusion. I'm still trying to understand why people back in that > > time were referred to by different names. > > You should bear in mind that surnames were only just developing. A person named Robert, had several different identities at the same time. He was son of a specific father, so he could be referred to using a patronymic such as FitzRichard (son of Richard). > > He co1uld be identified based on the land he held, as Robert, Lord of Dunmow (and since he may have held more than one property, each of these would be equally correct). Not applicable here, but we also are working in an environment with three languages, so the same location could rightly be called Albo Monasterio [Latin], Blancminster [Norman-French] and Whitchurch [English]. > > There there is the system that was just developing, of more stable family names - the son of a man using the same name as he used, even if what of originally represents no longer applies - so in Robert was son of Richard de Clare, he would be Robert de Clare even if he never himself held that property. > > These were all aspects of an individual's life and existence, and any could be selected when a scribe wanted to distinguish one man named Robert from another. > > These, along with occupational names would come to be surnames, would stabilize and be uniformly used by sequential generations, but this had yet to happen at the time we are talking about, and even when it occurred, families sometimes shifted, with noble families abandoning the more common patronymics for property-based names, or shifting those names when they acquired a more prestigious property or title. > > To make a confusing situation all the more confusing, modern genealogists and historians put much more of a premium on consistency than the contemporaries did. Thus some of us would rather call an entire family 'de Clare', even if no one at the time did (or to give an example raised here repeatedly, many prefer to refer to all members of a family as FitzAlan, even during a period when they called had switched to calling themselves Arundell). For this reason, sometimes the descendants of the original lords of Clare are called de Clare by modern researchers when they never identified themselves with that name, or even worse, you may find someone calling a the whole family FitzRichard, just because a single member of the family happened to be son of a Richard. > > This is simply one of the challenges under which we operate. Excellent summary. I would only add yet another wrinkle, in that even when surnames began to become fixed, they were not necessarily inherited paternally. Often the names came through whichever line contained the inheritance. Once the paternal "status quo" in English speaking counties became the norm, it only stuck for a few hundred years, and now last names are becoming more fluid yet again. Joe C

On Sunday, May 22, 2016 at 9:09:18 AM UTC-7, joe...@gmail.com wrote: > Excellent summary. I would only add yet another wrinkle, in that even when > surnames began to become fixed, they were not necessarily inherited > paternally. Often the names came through whichever line contained the > inheritance. This did happen in England, but was rampant in Iberia, where it might depend on which was the most prominent/distinctive, and you can find the siblings in a single family with a seeming random distribution of maternal and paternal surnames. taf