Calling changes by name : the Massachusetts family viewed through an onomastic lens, 1660-1860 / by Kaila Knight Schwartz.
This study addresses the unique naming patterns found among Massachusetts families from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth and connects the changes in these patterns to broader shifts in religious and cultural beliefs. One scholar described names as "an ideal cultural metric,"...
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| Format: | Thesis Book |
| Language: | English |
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2014.
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| Summary: | This study addresses the unique naming patterns found among Massachusetts families from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth and connects the changes in these patterns to broader shifts in religious and cultural beliefs. One scholar described names as "an ideal cultural metric," because they are universal (everyone has one), usually permanent (few people change them), and can easily be tracked across space and time using birth records. Naming reflects the intentions and ideals of the namer rather than the named, but has a psychological effect on both. Parents must adhere to what society considers acceptable for the sake of their children. The types of names used and the relatives who acted as namesakes provide insight into parental expectations for their children, the differences imposed by gender roles, and the relationship between members of the family. Earlier scholars analyzed New England naming, especially that of the first Puritan settlers, beginning in the nineteenth century. Most focused on the families in a single town, and examined either the descent of names from parents and grandparents or the types of names parents chose, not both. This study focuses on a branching network of one thousand, four hundred children in two hundred and twenty- five families, spanning two hundred years, and covering much of eastern Massachusetts. It embraces a wider circle of possible namesakes (including parents' siblings), which affects the timing and scale of the decline of familial names. It also treats non-familial names in distinct categories, in order to better analyze parents' selections, adding greater complexity to the general progression of name types observed by previous students of New England names. Additionally, this study considers the written accounts of twenty-five men and women who recorded the logic guiding the selection of names for seventy children. These sources facilitated an investigation of the intersection of names and belief systems in three specific areas over time: the balance of familial and non-familial names, and variation within those categories; the names of the dead, and their relation to gravestone iconography and concerns about the afterlife; and the different name choices for boys and girls in conjunction with their expected gender roles. Familial naming and the use of the Old Testament as the primary source of names both started to decline in the late 18th century, and continued into the 19th century, but the reasons driving these changes are more complex than simple secularization or individualization would suggest. |
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| Physical Description: | 143 leaves ; 28 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-143). |