I'm sure we all have at least one example of this - two of my mother's cousins married men who had been baptised John. One was always known as Dick and the other as Pete. And no, they weren't their middle names or nicknames, they had just 'always been called that' for reasons lost in the midst of time... I don't think they knew themselves how it had happened. Julia -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Colin Mills Sent: 08 June 2012 16:50 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [SOG-UK] baptismal names It could be worse: one of my cousins was always known as Tony, and my brother was called Anthony after him. It turned out afterwards that he was in fact named John Edwin. Regards, Colin Mills On 07/06/2012 15:08, MILLARD A.R. wrote: >> From: ag.hamilton >> Sent: 07 June 2012 14:44 > <snip> >> Is it likely that a child would be baptised using the diminutive of a >> name but subsequently known by the name in it's full form? > <snip> >> So the question is: were Betty and Jenny PRING the same as Elizabeth >> and Jane PRING? > It sounds as if every record you have was written by officials and none of them were written by Elizabeth/Betty or her close relatives. In that case you are at the mercy of the interpretations of those officials. If 'everyone knows' that Betty is short for Elizabeth, then officials are likely to infer that a woman reporting her name as Betty is actually an Elizabeth, and when they are making a formal record they may well use what they think is the formal name. One of my relations is called Tony, but 'everyone knows' that is short for Anthony, so many people assume that wedding invitations, etc., should be addressed to Anthony, because they don't realise that Tony is actually his given name and not a shortened form. If your Betty could not read she may never have known that her name was being written down as Elizabeth, or conversely, never having seen the baptismal register, she may have assumed that her 'real' name was Elizabeth even though her parents addressed her as Be! tty. > > > > Best wishes > > Andrew > -- > Andrew Millard - [email protected] > Bodimeade genealogy: http://community.dur.ac.uk/a.r.millard/genealogy/Bodimeade/ > My family history: http://community.dur.ac.uk/a.r.millard/genealogy/ > GenUKI Middx + London: http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/genuki/MDX/ + > ../LND/ > > > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the > quotes in the subject and the body of the message > > ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

On 8 June 2012 17:09, Julia Riley <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm sure we all have at least one example of this - two of my mother's > cousins married men who had been baptised John. One was always known as Dick > and the other as Pete. And no, they weren't their middle names or nicknames, > they had just 'always been called that' for reasons lost in the midst of > time... I don't think they knew themselves how it had happened. There is usually family logic behind these types of nicknames. My father was officially Geoffrey Cyril. As the youngest of six he was always eager to keep up with his older siblings, which led to his parents calling him "Little Billy Beaver" because he "beavered away". As a result, he was known as "Bill" to his family for the rest of his life. Caroline Gurney www.carosfamily.com