This is sent as a Christmas greeting to all the Williamses out there who are seeking their origins in Wales, particularly. I think we are swimming upstream. Have you ever looked at a Welsh phone book? Nothing but Williams for pages and pages. E.W.Wallace (a born Williams) with three Williams lines Subj: Missing Links, Vol. 7, No. 49, 13 December 2002  Date: 12/13/02 6:21:58 PM Pacific Standard Time From: <A HREF="mailto:juliecase@prodigy.net">juliecase@prodigy.net</A> Reply-to: <A HREF="mailto:missinglinks-request@petuniapress.com">missinglinks-request@petuniapress.com</A> To: <A HREF="mailto:missinglinks@petuniapress.com">missinglinks@petuniapress.com</A> Sent from the Internet (Details) MISSING LINKS: A Magazine for Genealogists Vol. 7, No. 49, Friday, 13 December 2002    Circulation: 17,799+ http://www.petuniapress.com/         (c) 2001-2002 Julia M. Case Editor-at-Fault: Julia M. Case  juliecase@prodigy.net o The Worm's Eye View: First Name Last, Last Name First o Reprint Policy; Subscribe/Unsubscribe Instructions, etc.      THE WORM'S EYE VIEW: First Name Last, Last Name First              By Beth Maltbie Uyehara  BUYE@aol.com The word "patronymics" is a Latin derivative; that is, it's a word whose roots are derived from the Latin language. In the case of patronymics, there are three root elements: patro, from pater or patris, meaning "father"; nym, which comes from nomen or nominis, meaning "name"; and ics, from ick or yuck, meaning "a very bad idea." Thanks to genealogy, I have learned more about patronymics than I ever wanted to know, including how to spell it. Genealogists who descend from some of the world's saner Ethnicities--Germans and Poles and the French and English and Japanese and others who grasped the value of surnames early on—- can sit back and smirk while I bemoan the trials of those of us whose ancestors hailed from Scandinavia or Wales, both of which used patronymics. In patronymics, there are no surnames; the last name of a child is based on the father's first name; thus, the family's last name changes every generation. In the Welsh system, the last name gets added on to. For example, a child "John" whose daddy was John the son of John, becomes "John" the son of John the son of John. As you can see, the Welsh could end up with some pretty long names in a few short generations. In Scandinavia, on the other hand, the last name changed entirely every generation. In either case, you've got a research nightmare on your hands. Marital conversations upon the arrival of a new Welsh baby apparently went something like this: "Hey, John-the-son-of-John-the-son-of-John, let's call the baby John!" "What a great idea, Mary-the-daughter-of-David-the-son-of-David. How'd you ever think of that?" "Oh, I dunno, John-the-son-of-John-the-son-of-John, it just came to me out of the blue." Of course, in Wales, they didn't say "son of" or "daughter of." They said "ap" or "mab" and "verch" or "ferch" respectively. Welsh women kept their maiden names when they married, because it would have been too baffling to call someone "Mary ap John" (Mary the son of John) (huh?) after she married "John ap John," instead of continuing to call her "Mary verch David" (Mary the daughter of David), which is who she was. You've got to draw the line somewhere. Because of the length of the last names, to avoid crashing the Internet, the IGI indexes all Welsh people prior to 1812 only by their first names and, separately, by their fathers' first names. (There are two indexes.) Let us pause here a moment, while the research implications of that sink in . . . . Patronymics must have seemed like a good idea at the time when people were using it. When you're slowly working your way forward a generation at a time, it's fairly easy to keep track of everybody, especially if you come up with new baby names every generation. The problem arises when you're trying to trace people backwards in time by their first names only, and everybody and his brother has got the same few first names. In Scandinavia, "bynames" delineating the relationship to the father followed the given name; occasionally, however, a nickname would be used as a last name instead. From the examples I found on the Internet, the usual nickname was something like "Snot Nose," which is not the kind of last name you want to hand down. In cases like that, patronymics was a blessing. Overall, the Welsh had the more logical system. Creating Scandinavian bynames was not as easy as you might think. You had to switch around the final letters in the genitive form of the father's first name, then add the suffix for son or daughter. The first problem was finding someone who could explain what the genitive form of a name is. And, then, there were all those rules for switching the letters around. For example, in the olden days, a final i became an a, a became u, nn became ns, ll became ls, rr became rs except when it didn't, r became s and the suffixes dan, endr, gautr, mundr, undr, un, unn and vindr, among numerous others, required the addition of ar. Without rules, where would we be? One example I found of Scandinavian byname formation concerned a child named Yngvildr, who was the daughter of a man named Einarr. The child went through life as Yngvildr Einardottir. No wonder the Vikings were always beating people up. It must have been a relief to everyone when surnames became universal. But, as you'd guess--the human race being what it is--it did not happen all at once. In our modern era, we are used to everyone agreeing that the new year will start at midnight on December 31, and for the next 365 days (give or take a few minutes, or in my case, a couple of weeks) everyone will write a new set of digits on their checks. But, imagine if people just switched to a new year whenever they felt like it. Well, that's the way people adopted surnames: whenever they felt like it. Which brings me to my g-g-g-grandmother. I have in my possession a certified copy of an entry of marriage of 3 March 1838, from Monmouthshire, Wales, attesting to the marriage of Rachel, the daughter of Thomas Harris. The part of the form filled out by the parish priest identifies the bride as "Rachel Thomas," using her father's first name as Rachel's last name. This is a nice, normal, traditional Welsh patronymic way to do things. Rachel, however, had obviously decided to adopt one of those newfangled surnames, and she signed the form "Rachel Harris." I keep wondering if she and the priest glared at each other and shoved the register back and forth. "It's Harris." "It's Thomas." "No, it's Harris." Etc. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if voices were raised, despite the solemnity of the occasion. I come from a fairly feisty line of women. Setting aside the question of whether this marriage was even legal (which is the kind of pesky detail that rarely concerned my ancestors, so why should it bother me at this late date?), the certificate records the very day--indeed, the golden moment--when patronymics was abandoned and a surname was officially adopted in one of my ancestral lines. Eventually, of course, all of our ancestors adopted surnames, and except for Madonna and Cher, few of us these days try to get through life with only one name. The lone patronymic holdout is the British royal family. The current heir to the throne of England was christened something like Charles Philip George Edward John David Reginald James Arthur Fenwick Stephen Vladimir Sherman. (It must take him a week to sign a check for the pizza-delivery guy.) You may think that giving a poor defenseless baby such a long string of first names was simply a royal affectation, like lifting the little pinkie while drinking tea, but we genealogists know better. We know it was because the guy was destined to become the Prince of Wales, and they wanted him to feel at home. [THE ZEN OF GENEALOGY: The Lighter Side of Genealogy, by Beth Maltbie Uyehara. The "Worm's Eye View of Genealogy" first appeared in "Missing Links" as a series of columns reflecting on the nuttier aspects of genealogy. Here's the lowdown on how to get contributions to a genealogy newsletter; how to win friends and dazzle your cousins with your research; how to kick the genealogy addiction; how to tell your kissing cousins from your dissing cousins; how to win the real Salt Lake City Olympic events; how to organize your paperwork—-for good; how to combine yoga and genealogy for the ultimate out-of-body experience; how to get your spouse hooked on genealogy, too; and much more. Some "Worm's Eye View" columns are collected here together for the first time, along with new offerings. 2002, 125 pp., paper, $13.95 #U2272 at http://www.heritagebooks.com/ ] /////// PERMISSION TO REPRINT articles from MISSING LINKS is granted unless stated otherwise, provided: (1) the reprint is not used for commercial purposes; and (2) the following notice appears at the end of the article: Previously published in MISSING LINKS, Vol. 7, No. 49, 13 December 2002  http://www.petuniapress.com                          *    *    * CALL FOR ARTICLES, STORIES. MISSING LINKS welcomes articles about genealogical research methods and sources from all parts of the world. MISSING LINKS also welcomes delightful, amusing, amazing, cautionary, and otherwise educational and wonderful tales of genealogical research. 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