Naming Children in Early New England

Summary: A study of the naming practices o New England settlers provides an

overview of their cultural and

social ideologies.

Naming children in early New England.

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In the larger scheme of things, choosing a name for a new baby is no

world-shaking matter. How, then, justify a serious study of so apparently

trivial an event? Two related premises warrant it. First, small rituals

reflect larger values, and, second, their performers need possess no

personal importance in order to signify those values. This, then, is an

inquiry into a universal species of human social behavior, one readily

susceptible to measurement and situated to signal deep cultural change. The

site is early New England, and published family genealogies supply the

data.(1)

New Englanders shared with English settlers elsewhere in British North

America many common social institutions, such as those respecting justice,

property rights, and family law. Where they principally differed, some

historians believe, was in the nature of their religious ideas, as well as

in the vigor with which they espoused them. This belief system shaped the

middle-class character of the migration, everyone concedes, but what,

exactly, was "Puritan" about the society that they created? Surely the

environment into which they moved played some role in molding their culture.

Long life, large families, and limited agricultural resources combined to

fuel population pressures early in New England's history, and organizers of

new settlements had to contend with the prior rights of Native Americans.

Every able-bodied male trained to march against the enemy and to defend

against the Catholic French to the north. English and Puritan, Yankee and

American, New Englanders combined old and new as they adapted and evolved,

each generation a product both formed and formative. The emergence and

subsidence of naming patterns tracks some of those transitions.(2)

The sources for this study consist of a sample of published genealogies of

families formed by first marriages, as listed in the appendix. Some pertain

to families settling in specific locales, and others to descendants of

founders wherever they lived or moved. Modern genealogies normally include

information about names, dates, places of birth, baptisms, marriages, and

deaths of family members, insofar as compilers have discovered them. The

underlying records from which such information comes vary widely in quality

and coverage, just as the compilers themselves have proven uneven in their

diligence and care.

The four principal factors organizing the genealogical material are (I) the

place where parents resided while bearing the majority of their children

("place" in this study includes seven widely scattered townships, plus three

counties in Plymouth Colony, plus Rhode Island Colony); (2) time (marriage

cohorts of parents and birth cohorts of offspring); (3) sex; and (4) birth

order of children, relative to their siblings of the same sex. The sample is

sufficiently large to support statistical testing of hypotheses concerning

differences among places and long-term trends.(3)

NAMING THE FIRSTBORN

Fischer proposed that naming children for their parents was a supremely New

England folk phenomenon - that the custom originated as a product of

covenant theology among Puritan emigrants from East Anglia, who counted

among their numbers the founding elite of eastern Massachusetts, and later

spread. This viewpoint raises questions concerning the mechanisms underlying

cultural creation and diffusion. In particular, it is not clear why

parent-centered naming should have emerged among Puritans from just one

region in England if it were a natural product of a "covenant theology"

espoused by coreligionists generally.(4)

Fischer carried out his own research on children born in the town of

Concord, Massachusetts. Smith's study of Hingham is more useful, because he

focuses on the naming of the firstborn, which provides a more rigorous test

of Fischer's hypothesis, for two reasons. First, New England families

produced more living children, on average, than did families elsewhere,

thereby increasing the chances for a son or daughter to receive the same

name as a parent. This fact alone would tend to overstate the practice in

comparison with other colonies. Second, and more important, the choice for

the firstborn of either sex usually carries special significance for the

parents, relative to subsequent offspring, thus magnifying its usefulness

for historical analysis.(5)

Smith's study town of Hingham became predominantly East Anglian as the

result of a factional schism between the original settlers who came from the

West of England and later arrivals from Norfolk in East Anglia, who

thereafter dominated the town. Smith's analysis of naming practices in

Hingham counted 74 percent of the firstborn daughters in the period before

1735 sharing their mothers' name and 67 percent of the firstborn sons

sharing their fathers' (see Table I). These are substantial majorities,

supporting arguments that the town's residents had united culturally, but

when and why? Fischer provides anecdotal evidence that the pre-Puritan

naming practices in East Anglia had given priority to grandparents over

parents. Hingham's practice, then, was presumably the product of conditions

in New England.(6)

Table I compares Hingham with four English parishes, a Virginia county, and

New England family genealogies. The English data show marked variation. The

sample village in the North of England differed substantially from its

counterparts in the midlands and the west, but all three places favored

grandparents over parents in choosing names for the firstborn, especially

for girls. This same preference for grandparents over parents emerges even

more clearly in the Virginia data. We do not know how many firstborn were

named for grandparents in Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, but the proportion of

girls named for their mothers rose abruptly after 1650.(7)

New England naming habits departed sharply from those of old England and

Virginia, but did not shift as far toward parent-centered naming as Hingham

did. Parents in our genealogical sample who were born in England initiated

the transition, but it emerged more strikingly among those born in the New

World. American-born parents proved three times more likely than parents in

England to name a firstborn daughter for her mother and almost twice as

likely to name a firstborn son for his father. New England naming was indeed

different and its origin English. Was it also specifically "Puritan"?

New Englanders varied among themselves, as the bar charts in Figures I and 2

disclose. The towns and counties constituting the sample are arranged along

the axis according to their naming preferences. The parents from those on

the left end, led by Windsor, Connecticut, tended to name their children

after themselves. Parents living in communities on the right side of the

chart - Rhode Island and Rowley, Massachusetts - took the more traditional

approach of naming their firstborn, especially gifts, for their own parents.

Those from areas between the two extremes - Wallingford, Connecticut, and

Barnstaple and Plymouth Counties in the Old Colony - inclined neither way,

whether out of a conscious rejection of both old and new modes or, more

likely, from a comparative weakness of the institutions responsible for

framing these decisions.

What lies behind these three sets of responses to New World conditions? The

argument about East Anglian origins can be readily dismissed. The New

England town closest in naming practice to East Anglian Hingham was non-East

Anglian Windsor, established in 1635/36 by West Countrymen who had settled

four years before at Dorchester, Massachusetts. Parent-centered naming

characterized Windsor families from the beginning, as Table 2 reveals.

Because Dorchester lies just west of Weymouth and Hingham, one might

speculate about the possibility of East Anglian hegemony. However, all three

of these towns were first settled by West Country immigrants prior to the

influx of East Anglians at middecade, who were arriving just as the

Dorchester party was already setting out for Windsor.(8)

Regional traditions did not simply evaporate. They throve where conditions

were right. The strong persistence of Yorkshire customs that Allen found in

Rowley probably accounted for the high proportion of daughters named for

grandmothers there. Since polyglot Rhode Island shows a strikingly similar

pattern, however, one must conclude that the regional origins of settlers,

per se, cannot successfully predict postemigration patterns.

The absence of pattern can be instructive. The Mayflower descendants living

in the Old Colony and settlers of New Haven's northern neighbor,

Wallingford, stand out for their apparent indifference to both ideological

and lineal concerns in naming their firstborn of either sex. What did

Wallingford and Plymouth share in common? They were both dispersed

settlements, more intent on making a living than building communities.

Plymouth Colony had started out as a single fortified site, but the flood of

new immigrants arriving in the 1630S bid eagerly for its cattle and grain.

Residents fanned out to ensure ample supplies of fodder for their livestock.

This dispersion to maximize returns per farmhand made excellent economic

sense but it eroded old ties as it created new ones.(9)

The reasons for Wallingford's rejection of traditional naming customs also

lay in its lack of communal purpose. The motives of the first settlers from

New Haven in the 1650S, soon to be joined by outsiders from the Bay, were

primarily material. The members of the planning committee did not envision a

village center surrounded by open fields; they simply laid out the land in

separate contiguous farms, ready for enclosure.(10)

The cases of Plymouth and Wallingford illustrate the principle that it is

difficult to build communities or develop distinctive customs in the midst

of transience and dispersion. The opposing situation in Rowley lends support

to this argument. Rowley, like Windsor, was founded by a congregation, but,

because Rowley's congregation had belonged to the same parish back home, the

inhabitants of the new town remained homogeneous and stable in its early

years. The unusually long existence of Rowley's classic open-field system is

a telling index of its conservatism.(11)

The perplexities of local variation should not detract from the central

truth that parent-centered naming of the firstborn of both sexes was much

more popular in New England than in old England or Virginia, and especially

so for daughters - a vital clue to unraveling the rationale behind naming

decisions. Whereas parents in the sample villages in England disagreed about

the importance of perpetuating grandparents' names, after 1650 all but Dry

Drayton eschewed the option of naming first daughters for mothers. This

concerted action suggests the existence of a cultural "taboo" - that it was

not appropriate for a young mother to name her first daughter after herself.

Doing so may have breached the modesty expected from the second sex. This

taboo did not entirely dissipate in New England, either, but parents of

firstborn daughters in seven out of eleven places did prefer mothers' names

to grandmothers'. Something about moving to New England, as opposed to

Virginia, enabled or entitled women to defy, if not quite master, this

covert proscription.

That "something" surely had to do with religion, but what precisely? Fischer

identifies "covenant theology" as the source of New England's naming

customs, because it enhances the spiritual role of the parents within the

family, and of the husband vis-a-vis his wife. However, most

post-Reformation English manuals of family advice also advocated these

roles, so one must take care not to overstate its "Puritan" provenance.

Smith does not engage the theological argument but believes that the Puritan

abandonment of the institution of godparentage undermined old naming

rituals, freeing parents to choose as they wished. The two arguments are

distinct but compatible.(12)

Let us look at godparentage first. In the Anglican and Roman Catholic

baptismal tradition, parents honored godparents by naming children for them,

as recompense for undertaking their spiritual education. The custom of

godparentage was a means of extending and strengthening kinship ties

sacramentally to create a safety net for children should misfortune befall

their parents. Good manners dictated that parents forego the option of

choosing other names.

Whom did parents usually select for this purpose? Surprisingly little is

known about actual practices in England or the colonies, but studies of the

Dutch in Schenectady, New York, and of Dutch gentry of two areas in early

modern France show that parents followed the customary sequence of asking

grandparents first and then siblings to act in this capacity for each child

in turn, the precise succession depending on the child's sex. The actual

names were the outcome of customary formulae that were reinforced by the

rituals of baptism.(13)

There is no evidence of this institution in New England. Many English

reformers had railed against the practice, labeling it superstitious and

popish. Protestants of all persuasions retained the sacrament of baptism

itself; popular beliefs tended to endow it with a kind of magical

prophylactic against witches' curses. However, radicals, such as Quakers and

Baptists, denounced infant baptism as having no basis in Scripture. The

belief in the necessity or efficacy of baptism for children in New England

is well documented by diaries and Bible entries that show the short lapse of

time between birth at home and baptism in the meeting house, usually on the

following Sunday.(14)

Infant baptism retained special importance in non-Baptist and non-Quaker

areas of New England, but at the Puritan baptismal rite, parents assumed the

role of primary spiritual guides for their children. Since they did not have

to name their infants for godparents, parents were free to bestow any name

of their own choosing. However, access to baptism itself could be a problem.

"Strict" Congregationalism in New England permitted baptism only of infants

born to church members. Hence the difficulty or ease of parents achieving

membership in the local church raised or lowered the risk of damnation or

the witch's curse for their children.(15)

Debates about rules of admission emerged almost at once in New England and,

in the 1640s and 1650s, repeatedly disrupted such congregations as Windsor

and Wethersfield in the Connecticut valley. They became particularly urgent

in the 1660s, when the first great wave of children born in New England

began to marry and bear children. Because many of this generation could not

testify to personal conversion experiences - the sine qua non for admission

among strict constructionists - the Massachusetts synod of 1662 recommended

a "Half-Way Covenant." This proposal was meant to incorporate into the

church, without granting full rights, all adult children of members living a

godly life and "owning the covenant," thus qualifying their children for

baptism. Not until 1671, however, did a majority of representatives to the

Massachusetts General Court vote in support of the clergy's recommendation,

and their vote was not binding on the congregations.(16)

Anxiety about getting baptisms for their children undoubtedly played a key

role in prompting new parents to apply for membership. Even after the Great

Awakening, Edwards, the Northampton minister, made complaint that "owning

the covenant has . . . too much degenerated into a matter of mere form and

ceremony; it being visibly a prevailing custom for persons to neglect this

until they come to be married, and then to do it for their credit's sake,

and that their children may be baptized." Ramsbottom's analysis of

seventeenth-century church membership records in Charlestown, Massachusetts,

persuasively argues that families decided to join the church there largely

because of the birth of children. Notably, it was the mother who

characteristically made the vital step to obtain this certification of

Christian citizenship.(17)

Naming the first born for oneself or one's spouse was a way to claim an

inherited right to divine protection for one's children. The struggle

concerning church admission, with its implications for access to infant

baptism, together with the empowerment of women through membership, helps to

explain the origin of New England parents' distinctive preference for naming

their firstborn for themselves. The rise and subsequent fall in the

chronology of parent-centered naming, depicted in Figure 3, coincided with a

similar rise and fall in parental anxiety concerning access to baptism for

their children. The practice became well established before New England's

troubled time in the final quarter of the seventeenth century, and it

gradually lost force during the course of the ensuing century.

Traditional customs favoring grandparents persisted, but the wife's side

lost prestige even in this context (see Table 2). Father's mother (FM) had

usurped mother's mother in naming the first daughter. Again, the baptismal

rite may have been the cause. Postpartum mothers did not often leave their

homes until six weeks after their baby's birth; so the parent presenting the

baby for baptism, and announcing its name, normally would have been the

father. Samuel Sewall, for one, in his diary, indicates that he was

responsible for the names of his children: "Mr. Willard . . . baptized my

young Son, whom I named Joseph. . . ." "I named my Daughter Judith for the

sake of her Grandmother and Great Grandmother. . . ." "I named my little

Daughter Sarah. . . . I was struggling whether to call her Sarah or

Mehitabel; but when I saw Sarah's standing in the Scripture, viz: Peter,

Galatians, Hebrews, Romans, I resolv'd on that side. Also Mother Sewall had

a sister Sarah; and none of my sisters [are] of that name."(18)

Whoever made the actual decision, choices of names for the firstborn suggest

a widespread set of values about family relations, which, by elevating the

symbolic power of parents and husbands, tended to diminish that of the

grandparents. The ideas behind the founders' reform played themselves out in

ways not always anticipated at the time. The abandonment of godparentage had

pruned away the encircling branches of mutual obligation, placing the fate

of the children yet more firmly in their parents' hands. Restrictions on

admission to church membership, on the other hand, threatened parental

access to that rite. New England's baby boomers sought reassurance under the

Halfway-Covenant.

Although the need, or desire, of parents to patent their firstborn had

diminished, there was no revival of the old custom honoring grandparents.

Parents became even freer in their selections. As Figure 3 indicates, the

long-term trend disfavored both parents' and grandparents' names. Indeed,

investigation of the names given to children not named for either a parent

or grandparent in the Puritan-Yankee world reveals the emergence of a

movement toward the more individualistic, child-centered naming that would

eventually reign supreme.

CHOOSING FORENAMES FOR CHILDREN NOT NAMED FOR PARENT OR GRANDPARENT

Naming customs tend to restrict the number of forenames in use. In the three

English parishes studied by Price and in the Rutmans' Virginia County, for

instance, those parents who named their first child after a grandparent

often named their second after themselves. The core pattern of naming boys

put father's father first and then father; for girls, it was mother's mother

and then mother. Similarly, in New England, of those naming their firstborn

for one of their own parents, half or more went on to name the second for

themselves. By contrast, only 15 to 20 percent of those New Englanders

naming their first for themselves went on to name the second for their

parents. The consequence of these opposing patterns was to limit the choice

of forenames for second children far less often in New England than in old

England and Virginia.(19)

Restriction of choice was further compounded in Virginia by that region's

much higher mortality rate for children - one out of two or three compared

to one out of five or six in England and New England. Because the English

and their American cousins tended to pass the forename of a deceased child

on to the next infant of the same sex, parents in Virginia recycled the

existing pool of forenames more often than the English and far more often

than New Englanders. The long life expectancy for adults in New England

allowed them to produce three times as many children per first marriage as

Virginians did, greatly extending the opportunities for selecting names.(20)

How did New England parents respond to their freedom of choice? In accord

with their religiosity, they relied heavily on the Bible as a source for new

forenames; however, they did not concentrate on a limited number of them. A

small percentage of children from the whole bore the most popular names, but

many other names were in circulation as well. Long ago, Stewart demonstrated

the striking proportion of biblical names among native-born New England

males, compared with the founders and the English in general. Reformed

Protestantism throughout Europe placed great importance on reading the

Bible, offering translations in the vernacular of the people. Since most New

England families owned such copies, it is hardly surprising that they drew

heavily on the Good Book for forenames, as Table 3 confirms.(21)

Stewart's summary of "the factors which seem to have led to the popularity

of a name in seventeenth-century New England" is worth restatement: Besides

those already in popular English use, the names that parents chose were

biblical and Hebrew, with a pious signification and no close Papist

associations, especially if borne by an important person in the Bible "who

was on the Lord's side." Smith's counts of names on the 1771 Massachusetts

tax list shows the continuing popularity of biblical names even in the late

colonial period, although the householders identified by them were born, and

hence named, some decades earlier.(22)

Table 3.1 Types of Names Given Daughters, Regardless of Birth

Order,

Who Were Not Named for Mother, Grandmother, or Sister - Hortatory,

Biblical, Traditional English, and Others, 1620-1799

YEAR BORN HORTATORY BIBLICAL TRAD. ENG. OTHER TOTAL

1620-1654 24% 62% 14% 0% 21

1655-1674 15 72 13 0 116

1675-1694 15 75 9 1 390

1695-1714 15 71 12 2 772

1715-1734 12 73 12 3 1,161

1735-1754 7 71 15 7 1,371

1755-1774 5 60 17 18 1,326

1775-1794 3 44 23 30 613

Average 9% 66% 14% 10%

Total 526 3,828 811 605 5,770

Table 3.2 Types of Names Given Sons, Regardless of Birth Order, Who

Were Not Named for Father, Grandfather, or Brother

YEAR BORN HORTATORY BIBLICAL TRAD. ENG. OTHER TOTAL

1620-1654 0% 85% 15% 0% 52

1655-1674 0 83 15 2 174

1675-1694 - 84 15 1 460

1695-1714 - 83 14 3 915

1715-1734 1 80 15 4 1,205

1735-1754 2 79 12 8 1,575

1755-1774 1 69 15 15 1,375

1775-1794 - 57 21 22 660

Average 1% 75% 15% 9%

Total 50 4,849 945 572 6,416

SOURCE New England family genealogies in Appendix.

There was also a clear difference between the sexes. As Stewart noticed, New

England parents rarely bestowed Puritan or "hortatory" names on boys, only

girls. Fischer had found some particularly dramatic examples for boys in

England - "Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith," "Kill-sin," and

"Fly-fornication." Names in this study's genealogical sample, alas, are much

tamer. "Hate-evil" is the most vivid, and the others pale by comparison:

"Fear," "Experience," and "Hopewell" for boys; "Hope," "Mindwell,"

"Thankful," "Prudence," "Experience," "Silence," and many others for girls.

Such names proved particularly popular among Mayflower and Rhode Island

families.(23)

The third column in tables 3.1 and 3.2 is labeled "traditional English."

Drawing on Stewart's lists of male names, and adding those of Jamestown

settlers and men on the Rutmans' lists from Middlesex County, Lavender

concluded "that other than in Puritan areas eight traditional English names

comprised a little over 60 per cent of the males names . . . with little

variation in their relative frequencies in either time or place." The eight

names are, in order of numerical importance, "John," "William," "Thomas,"

"Richard," "Robert," "James," "Henry," and "George." Lavender then analyzed

male names in the Federal Census of 1790 and calculated the share claimed by

the traditional eight among nineteen ethnic-regional groups: 47 percent in

"English" Virginia but only 23 to 24 percent in New England.(24)

Lavender's traditional eight did about the same in our sample genealogies,

garnering 25.6 percent of boys' names among those born between 1725 and

1749, for instance. The eight most popular names in that cohort did not

include "Richard," "Robert," "Henry," or "George," which had been superseded

by such Old Testament names as "Samuel," "Joseph," and "Benjamin."

The fourth category of names in tables 3.1 and 3.2 is "other," a catch-all

for surnames, diminutives, invented names, and names drawn from literature.

Parents in Virginia and New England used surnames to honor a local notable,

commemorate a culture hero, or perpetuate the mother's or grandmother's

patrilineage. On the other hand, the public and formal use of diminutives as

forenames in New England pertained only to girls when it came into fashion

in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. At about the same time,

parents began favoring boys with names drawn from the classics, whereas

girls were acquiring names of literary characters or euphonious

creations.(25)

Prior to 1750, the increase in the pool of forenames, expansive as it was,

scarcely kept up with the numbers of children, as Table 4 shows. After

midcentury, choices opened up in all directions. Old favorites fell out of

fashion, and new ones captured ever-smaller shares of the market. These

trends characterized naming practices for both sexes, but the entire stock

of forenames - traditional, biblical, and otherwise - proved consistently

more variable for boys than girls. In the period from 1700 to 1750, for

example, boys enjoyed almost twice as many names as girls. Among those with

biblical tags, boys shared three times as many as girls. The ten most

popular names in use among boys not named for a parent or grandparent

accounted for far fewer of each successive birth cohort than did the

contemporary top ten for girls, and that gap widened sharply before the War

of Independence: 51 percent versus 58 percent from 1650 to 1699, and 22

percent versus 39 percent from 1750 to 1774.(26)

Gender differences in naming practices bespeak differing cultural concerns

motivating parents. The most common girls' names in the New England family

genealogies before 1750 were "Mary," "Hannah," "Sarah," "Abigail,"

"Elizabeth," "Lydia," "Ann," and "Thankful." This line-up shares only four

out of eight forenames on a comparable list compiled by Price from three

parishes in England, 1621 to 1740, in Table 5. "Mary," "Elizabeth," and

"Ann" were traditional favorites in England, analogous to Lavender's male

names, "John," "Thomas," and "William," and they also headed the lists in

Middlesex County, Virginia. Understandably, the names "Sarah," "Hannah," and

"Abigail," with their important Old Testament precedents, are widely

represented in Puritan New England. But "Sarah" is also in fourth place on

the Middlesex lists, and "Hannah" placed thirteenth or fourteenth there.

Price's most popular twenty names in his three English parishes include

neither "Hannah" nor "Abigail," and the latter is also absent from the

Virginia rankings.(27)

An investigation of the roles suggested by these most popular names provides

clues to parents' motives in choosing them for their daughters. The

popularity of "Elizabeth" probably had more to do with the queen than with

the Bible, even among Puritans, because she personified Protestant England.

"Ann" and "Mary" have a long heritage of English and European usage but also

belonged to reigning Protestant queens.

Table 5 Comparing the Most Popular Names of Girls in New England,

1650-1749, with Those in Three English Parishs, 1621-1740

NEW ENGLAND(a) THREE ENGLISH PARISHS(b)

Mary 8% Elizabeth 17%

Hannah 8 Mary 14

Sarah 8 Ann 14

Elizabeth 6 Margaret 8

Abigail 5 Jane 7

Lydia 4 Alice 3

Ann 4 Grace 3

Thankful 3 Sarah 2

Total 46% Total 68%

a Arithmetic mean of mean scores of three lists, 1650-99, 1700-24,

and 1725-49, in Table 4.

b Arithmetic mean of mean scores of two lists, each from three

parishs, 1621-80, 1681-1740.

SOURCES Table 4; Richard Woodruff Price, "Child-Naming Patterns in

Three English Villages, 1558-1740: Whickham, Durham; Bottesford,

Leicester; and Hartland, Devon," unpub. M.A. thesis (Brigham Young

Univ., 1987), 66, 78.

Sarah was the half-sister and wife of Abraham, with whom God made the first

covenant (Genesis 15:18; 17:7-21). God allowed the childless Sarah to

conceive in her old age, so that she would be "the mother of nations and

kings." It is not far-fetched to suppose that Virginians and New Englanders

- not to mention the English - hoped that their Sarahs would be mothers of

nations, if not of kings.(28)

Hundreds of years after Sarah, Hannah, the second wife of Elkanah, also

conceived a child in answer to her prayers (I Samuel 1:1-28). Her son was

Samuel, who became Israel's greatest judge, and "Samuel" became the second

most popular name given to boys not named for their father or grandfather in

seventeenth-century New England.

Whereas Mary, Elizabeth, Sarah, and Hannah were all mothers of great men,

and Mary and Elizabeth were also queens identified with England and the

Protestant cause, Abigail had an altogether different allure. She was the

beautiful, brainy wife of the rich but churlish Nabal, who foolishly

insulted David, future king of Israel but then an outlaw on the lam. Abigail

arranged a meeting with David, and, entreating him with prophetic flattery

about his destiny to be ruler of both Judea and Israel, as well as with her

other charms, she managed to persuade him not to exact revenge on her

husband. When Nabal understood how his wife had saved the day (David had

vowed to exterminate all "that pisseth against the wall"), he died of

apoplexy. Hearing the good news, David promptly dispatched his servants to

Abigail to propose marriage.(29)

Abigail succeeded in pleasing both God and the future king of Israel, who

also happened to be the direct ancestor of Jesus (but by Bathsheba, not

Abigail). That the Puritans, unlike the English or the Virginians, should

have favored Abigail so heavily as a role model for their daughters puts

Puritan patriarchy during the settlement period in a different light, just

as their naming firstborn daughters for their mothers arguably represented

an enhancement of female prestige when compared with older practices in

Virginia and England.(30)

As Stewart argued, parents in New England's early decades did not choose

biblical names indiscriminately, but drew on the stories of right-minded

individuals - particularly in the case of daughters. Recall the popular use

of female hortatory names to invoke, in both bearer and caller, the

attitudes and postures most appropriate to Christian piety. The perpetuation

of these names, however, became familial, even for children not named for

parents or grandparents, because parents frequently used the names of their

own favorite siblings.(31)

As with mother-centered naming, the passage of time eroded the popularity of

role-model names. A classification of biblical namesakes according to the

moral significance of their places in Scripture - with such luminaries as

Sarah, Hannah, and Abigail on one side and such relative unknowns as

Mehitable, Chloe, and Susannah on the other - discloses a gradual but

clearly discernible long-term trend toward choosing girls' names from the

Bible for reasons other than their importance in sacred history . As Table 3

clearly shows, the years after 1750 also saw a sizable proliferation of

nonbiblical names. "Lucy"'s displacement of "Abigail" in the popularity

contest provides one such illustration.(32)

Secular-minded parents may have picked these newer names by magical means,

at random, or just for their poetic sound. Certain families even showed a

distinct preference for unusual names. The point remains that, in the middle

of the eighteenth century, parents were substituting new names for old, and

the reasons for their choices seem to have changed as well. They began to

favor pretty names - like Althea and Alethea, or Roxana and Roxalena - that

had a literary derivation. Althea was a classical name revived by Richard

Lovelace, the seventeenth-century poet, as a pseudonym for his beloved;

Roxanne was a heroine in the novel, Roxana, by Daniel Defoe (1724), who

enjoyed a glittering career as a courtesan until she was put in jail for

debt, dying there penniless but penitent. Parents even invented names:

Amaranda appears three times in Wallingford families and Luranna four times

before the revolution. Such names surfaced after 1750 and became steadily

more common, through the revolution and beyond.(33)

Another telling departure is the formalization of diminutives as proper

names for girls in public documents. Whereas the most common source of new

forenames for boys were last names - of family friends, prominent neighbors,

or their mother's side of the family - for girls, such long-familiar

diminutives as "Betty," "Betsy," "Molly," "Patty," and "Polly" began

appearing on baptismal and marriage records. When these girls were to become

adult women, they would still be addressed with children's names.

This supplanting of adult female names by their diminutive forms took place

elsewhere in the colonies, but, when viewed in the New England context - in

which the use of hortatory names and meaningful Old Testament names was

declining, and the use of exotic, glamorous, prestigious, or merely

pleasant-sounding names was ascending - it indicates a major inversion, at

least in New England, of the motives behind choosing names for gifts. Not

only did "Abigail" gave way to "Lucy," but "Polly," "Nancy," "Betsy," and

"Sally" were catching the fancy of sober republican parents in the

post-Revolutionary era. The growing popularity of such names may have been

witnessing a devaluation of feminine roles. "Dolly Madison" commanded less

respect than "Abigail Adams."(34)

Boys' names underwent a similar decline in biblical origin, but the new

choices revealed few literary allusions or diminutives, and an almost total

absence of whimsy. The naming of sons remained a serious matter, even for

parents who were willing to take risks naming daughters.

That the paths of these signifiers of social change should have divided

along gender lines is not surprising, given the previous history of naming

in New England. The popularity of mother-centered naming among parents of

the founding generations proved a far greater cultural departure than did

the naming of firstborn boys for their fathers. However, as the evidence

suggests, women in the eighteenth century may have lost some of the status

that they appear to have gained during the formative period of Puritan

culture, even though they were later to enjoy more indulgent childhoods.

The data on naming in New England, for both sexes, locates the greatest

cumulative change in the middle decades of the eighteenth century: the

continuing decay in parent-centeredness in naming the firstborn, the surge

in the number of names relative to the number of children, the decline of

the most popular names, and the divergence from hortatory names and biblical

role models. The long-term nature of these developments in naming practices

indicates the unlikelihood that discrete events in the pre-Revolutionary era

were responsible. Rather than increasing the pace of change, the epidemic of

throat distemper among children in certain parts of New England from 1725 to

1750 probably slowed it by creating more opportunities for the custom of

naming the next child of the same sex for one deceased. The Great Awakening

of the early 1740s clearly did not reverse the trend away from hardcore Old

Testament names; on the contrary, by challenging authority, the revivals

actually promoted freer choice.(35)

Naming practices provide valuable glimpses into the cultural wellsprings of

family and gender relationships, but decoding them is no simple matter. When

Puritan leaders banished godparents from the baptismal rite, they presented

parents with new power and endowed the act of naming with new significance.

Because the renunciation of godparents seems to have been universal in early

New England, the subregional differences in naming practices, particularly

for daughters, begged for an investigation of the possible relationship

between restricted access to baptism and the membership of women in the

church. Women who won admission secured both religious recognition for their

children and significant power for themselves.

The evidence in the tables and figures supports the contention that the

dissolution and reform of naming practices shows parents in the process of

rethinking their own roles and their expectations for their children.

Parents in eighteenth-century New England began to relinquish the

perpetuation of their own names in favor of a vastly expanded pool of new

ones. To a modern eye, these developments appear wholesome and liberating,

especially since many of the new names hinted at broader intellectual

horizons. But parents' tendency to substitute names with literary and

musical derivations, as well as diminutives, for the names of the strong

biblical role models that they had previously chosen for their daughters

suggests not just a softening of attitudes toward girls but also a trend

toward their infantilization.

If not for this disturbing indication, many of the changes in naming

practice may well have captured our interest primarily as early signs of the

movement from religiosity to secularism, or from tradition to modernity,

long before independence, republicanism, urbanization, industrialization,

and declines in the birth rate. This rejection of heritage, however, did not

necessarily signify a clear-cut destination. Historians have long since

surrendered teleological notions of "progress" after the Reformation, and

they are no longer blind to the uneven distribution of its costs and

benefits. The dividing paths of gender naming in early New England imply

that, although women appear to have advanced their social standing during

the original plantation process, by the middle of the eighteenth century

they were beginning to lose ground.

This study of naming in New England reveals how names can contribute to an

understanding of distinctive regional cultures and their long-term

evolution. Furthermore, comparison of the names of gifts with those of boys

confirms our suspicion that gender played an inextricable role in social

change.

1 Ethnographers and other social scientists have produced numerous studies

of naming customs. Among historians of the United States, George R. Stewart,

Men's Names in Plymouth and Massachusetts in the Seventeenth Century

(Berkeley, 1948), 109-138 is the pioneer. The works of historical

demographer Daniel Scott Smith have transformed the genre. See "Continuity

and Discontinuity in Puritan Naming: Massachusetts, 1771," William and Mary

Quarterly, XI (1994), 67-91; idem, "Child-naming Practices, Kinship Ties,

and Change in Family Attitudes in Hingham, Massachusetts, 1641 to 1880,"

Journal of Social History, XIX (1985), 541-566.

2 Virginia Dejohn Anderson, New England's Generation: The Great Migration

and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century

(Cambridge, 1992), 16-18, 37-39, offers the most recent statement of the

argument for the primacy of the religious motive in the New England

migration; but see also David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement

of Societies and the Transferral of English Local Law and Custom to

Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1981), 163-204,

who stresses economic opportunity combined with cultural conservatism; David

Cressey, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New

England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), 74-106, who gives

greater emphasis to economic motives among the complex mix behind the

migration. Not all emigrant Puritans went to New England. See Karen Ordahl

Kupperman, Providence Island (Chapel Hill, 1995); Arthur Percival Newton,

The Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans: The Last Phase of the

Elizabethan Struggle with Spain (New Haven, 1914).

3 Unfortunately, genealogies provide insufficient evidence of social and

economic status to classify families in these ways. Linking genealogical

data to tax lists would help, but the spottiness of surviving tax lists

would require heroic sample designs. One can, however, use existing probate

studies to compare the relative wealth of sample towns.

4 David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

(New York, 1989), 39-42, 47-49, 93-97; idem, "Forenames and the Family in

New England: An Exercise in Historical Ononmastics," in Robert M. Taylor,

Jr., and Ralph S. Crandall (eds.), Generations and Change (Macon, 1986),

222. A recent work by Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading

American Puritanism (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), divides "orthodox" Puritan

leaders of Massachusetts into two contending groups, pietists and

institutionalisis. If the division holds, it will undermine theories built

on the theological hegemony of the latter group. Dry Drayton,

Cambridgeshire, was five miles west of the University of Cambridge and

experienced its "Puritan" episode in the late sixteenth century, when many

unusual biblical names appear in the parish register. However, naming the

first born of both sexes did not become popular until the second half of the

seventeenth century, when roughly a third of the families followed this

practice well into the eighteenth century. See Michael F. Sekulla, "Patterns

of Naming in the Parish of Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1550-1850, unpub.

MA. thesis (Univ. of Leicester, 1993), 10.

5 Fischer, Albion's Seed, 94, lists pertinent demographic studies. See also

Richard Archer, "New England Mosaic: A Demographic Analysis for the

Seventeenth Century," William and Mar), Quarterly, XLVII (1990), 477-502.

6 John J. Waters, Jr., The Otis Family in Provincial and Revolutionary

Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, 1968), 21-27; Allen, In English Ways, 55-81;

Smith, "Child-Naming Practices as Cultural and Familial Indicators," Local

Population Studies, XXXII (1984), 17-27; idem, "Child-Naming Practices,"

541-566.

7 The data from the family reconstitutions were supplied by the Cambridge

Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Richard Woodruff

Price, "Child-Naming Patterns in Three English Villages, 1558-1740:

Whickham, Durham; Bottefford, Leicester; and Hartland, Devon," unpub. M.A.

thesis (Brigham Young Univ., 1987), 103-106.

8 For Windsor's founding, see Frank Thistlethwaite, Dorset Pilgrims: the

Story of West Country Pilgrims Who Went to New England in the 17th Century

(London, 1989), 97-99, 144-145. The Dorchester-Windsor group had formed into

a church just prior to leaving England under the leadership of John Warham,

their minister. Stephen Foster points out that Warham's Windsor church, like

Hooker's Hartford congregation, "adopted relatively generous tests of

visible sainthood," and both advocated a "liberal standard" for baptism

("English Puritanism and New England Institutions," in David D. Hall, John

M. Murrin, and Thad W. Tate [eds.], Saints and Revolutionaries: Essays on

Early American History [New York, 1984], 14). Weymouth's founders cannot be

precisely identified, according to Allen, "In English Ways: The Movement of

Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to

Massachusetts Bay, 1600-1690," unpub. Ph.D. diss. (Univ. of Wisconsin,

1974), 418.

9 On Rowley, see Allen, English Ways, 19-54. For Gov. William Bradford's

lament for Plymouth in 1632, see Samuel Eliot Morison (ed.), Of Plymouth

Plantation (Boston, 1921), 252-254. Darrett Rutman, Husbandmen of Plymouth:

Farms and Villages in the Old Colony, 1620-1692 (Boston, 1967), tells the

story well. John Demos provides demographic evidence for Plymouth Colony

mobility in "Notes on Life in Plymouth Colony," William and Mary Quarterly,

XXII (1965), 264-286.

10 Charles H. S. Davis, Early Families of Wallingford, Connecticut

(Baltimore, 1979; orig. pub. 1870); J. L. Rockey (ed.), History of New Haven

County, Connecticut (New York, 1892), I, 243, 344.

11 Fischer, Albion's Seed, 22; Allen, In English Ways, 30-36. Rowley's

cultural conservatism with respect to naming practices is interesting

because its pastor, Ezekiel Rogers, was a friend of John Winthrop and

earnestly "orthodox." Winthrop Papers, IV, 1638-1644 (Boston, 1944), 139,

149-152, 159-160, 215-216, 277, 281-282, 289-291, 397-401.

12 Fischer, Albion's Seed, 70, 83-86, 93-97; idem, "Forenames and the Family

in New England," 215-242; Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness

(Cambridge, 1956), 48-98. According to Miller, Puritans believed that God

willingly accommodated Himself to men by making covenants with them and by

responding to their deeds. See David D. Hall, "Understanding the Puritans,"

in Herbert Bass (ed.), The State of American History (Chicago, 1970),

330-349. Amanda Porterfield provides a useful discussion of the Puritan

manuals of advice in Female Piety in Puritan New England (New York, 1992).

See also Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations

in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York, 1966); Demos, A Little

Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970); Lawrence

Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York, 1977);

Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe

(Cambridge, 1983). For precedents of Puritan ideas about marriage in

Catholic and Anglican humanism, see Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the

Puritan Social Order (New York, 1987). Smith, "Continuity and

Discontinuity," 68 n.7; idem, "Child-Naming Practices as Cultural and

Familial Indicators," 17-27; idem, "Child-naming Practices . . . Hingham,"

541-566; personal communication to the author.

13 According to Sekulla, "Dry Drayton," parish records in Dry Drayton did

not list god-parents (21). Edward H. Tebbenhoff, "Tacit Rules and Hidden

Family Structure: Naming Practice and Godparentage in Schenectady, New York,

1680-1800," Journal of Social History, XVIII (1985), 567-585; Jacques

Dupaquer, "Naming Practices, Godparenthood, and Kinship in the Vexin,

1540-1900,"Journal of Family History, Vl (1981), 135-155; Margaret H.

Darrow, Revolution in the House; Family Class, and Inheritance in Southern

France, 1775-1825 (Princeton, 1990), 102; Sherrin Marshall, The Dutch

Gentry, 1500-1650: Family, Faith, and Fortune (New York, 1987), 19-22.

14 Christians believe that all humans bear the corrupting taint of Adam's

sin, even the very young. St. Augustine argued that the baby who died

without baptism was damned (see David Herlihy, Medieval Households

[Cambridge, Mass., 1985], 27). Cotton Mather argued that if children who

were baptized died as infants, "They shall none of them be lost" (quoted in

David Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in

Early New England [New York, 1991], 155. Hall also cites John Brand,

Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain [London, 1849, p.

335! on the folk belief that unbaptized children were highly vulnerable to

witches [284]). William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630-1833

(Cambridge, Mass., 1971), I, 28-32, clarifies the theological debate about

infant baptism and its connection to covenant theology. Family genealogies

also testify to this rush to baptize new-born babies.

15 The parish church in Dry Drayton remained within the Anglican fold, its

pulpit manned by "undistinguished" Cambridge graduates, according to

Sekulla. Access to baptism was not automatic in Anglican parishes, however,

if the clergyman did not approve. Sekulla provides the sixteenth-century

case of Richard Hodgekinson as a father who had to apply to a neighboring

parish to have his son baptized ("Dry Drayton," 23).

16 Dissidents from Windsor's church departed to settle Northampton in 1654.

Similarly, Wethersfield's beleaguered minister led the founding of Hadley in

1659 with like-minded people from Hartford and Windsor. Paul R. Lucas,

Valley of Discord: Church and Society Along the Connecticut River, 1636-1725

(Hanover, N.H., 1976), 38-79; Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant: Church

Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton, 1969), 16. The proportion of

infants born in Dedham who were baptized fell from 80% to 40%. Kenneth A.

Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years (New York, 1970),

33-34. The legislature of Connecticut did not adopt the Half-Way Covenant,

but most of its churches did not demand moving public performances from

candidates. Lucas, Valley of Discord, 106-107.

17 Jonathan Edwards, An Humble Inquiry Into the Rules of the Word of God

(Boston, 1749), quoted in Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 156. Mary MacManus

Ramsbottom, "Religious Society and the Family in Charlestown, Massachusetts,

1630-1740," unpub. Ph.D. diss. (Yale Univ., 1987). Gerald F. Moran describes

the growing feminization of church membership in New England in "The Puritan

Saint: Religious Experience, Church Membership, and Piety in Connecticut,

1636-1776," unpub. Ph.D. diss. (Rutgers Univ., 1974); idem, "'The Hidden

Ones': Women and Religion in Puritan New England," in Richard L. Greaves

(ed.), Triumph over Silence: Women in Protestant History (Westport, 1985),

125-149.

18 M. Halsey Thomas (ed.), The Diary of Samuel Sewall 1674-1729 (New York,

1973), 175, 264, 324. Also quoted by Stewart, Men's Names, 133-134.

19 Smith speculates that the need to distinguish among men of the same

surname in New England's highly stable towns led parents to be more

venturesome in choosing sons' forenames, as "a sort of verbal social

security number" ("Continuity and Discontinuity," 90). If so, the

significantly smaller pool of names in use for females may signify that the

distinctive identification of women carried a lesser priority.

20 Darrett Rutman and Anita Rutman, A Place in Time: Explicatus (New York,

1984), 52. Archer, "New England Mosaic," passim, summarizes the English data

on mortality and age at marriage in the seventeenth century and provides

estimates for New England. See the discussion on New England mortality rates

in Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis, Religion, Family, and the Life Course:

Explorations in the Social History of Early America (Ann Arbor, 1992),

33-35; Vinovskis, "Death and Family Life in the Past," Human Nature, I

(1990), 109-122.

21 Smith has documented the persistent reliance on biblical names among

heads of households in the Massachusetts Tax List of 1771: "The slow retreat

from biblical names did not become a rout until the early decades of the

nineteenth century" (Smith, "Continuity and Discontinuity," 69). Hall,

Worlds of Wonder, 32-42. Three-fifths of a sample of households inventoried

in New England before 1750 owned Bibles, and even the poorest third were as

likely to own them as not. Gloria L. Main and Jackson T. Main, "Economic

Growth and the Standard of Living in Southern New England,

1640-1774,"Journal of Economic History, XLVIII (1988), 43. Colonial Maryland

probate records showed a much smaller proportion of the poorest third of

families with books than in New England, more like one out of five or six

than one out of two. Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland,

1650-1720 (Princeton, 1982), 242; Stewart, Men's Names, 137.

22 Smith, "Continuity and Discontinuity," 69, 74. The lag between when the

householders were named and when their names appeared on this list, plus the

inclusion of people named for parents, grandparents, and deceased siblings,

would tend to understate the degree of variability in choosing names for

children in 1771. Since female householders were usually widows, their

average age must have been even older than the men's. The lag in naming

practices represented in the tax list would seem to be even greater for

women than for men.

23 Stewart, Men's Names, 124. Fischer presents some stand-outs from families

in Sussex, where, he believes, a single minister made such names popular

(Albion's Seed, 97).

24 Abraham Lavender, "United States Ethnic Groups in 1790: Given Names as

Suggestions of Ethnic Identity," Journal of American Ethnic History, IX

(1989), 42, 46, 48; Stewart, Men's Names, discusses biblical names at

length, 119-132. Smith's analysis of the male names on the Massachusetts tax

list of 1771 found similar distributions but is valuable mainly for its wide

geographical scope. The large number of names permitted Smith to test for

British versus Puritan dominance on a region-by-region basis and for the

(negative) relationship between British clustering and the percentage of

names claimed by the top five. Smith found that the most popular names were

generally the most popular in each town. Of the top five names in each town,

88% comprised the most popular eleven in the colony as a whole (Smith,

"Continuity and Discontinuity," 78-79).

25 For the fourth category, see Elizabeth Gidley Withycombe, The Oxford

Dictionary of English Christian Names (New York, 1988; 3d ed.), but this

volume has been superseded by two more recent works, Leslie Dunkling and

William Gosling, The New American Dictionary of Baby Names (New York, 1991);

Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, A Dictionary of First Names (New York,

1990), which this study used to recheck the original classification of

names. On biblical names, see Joan Comay and Ronald Brownrigg, Who's Who in

the Bible (New York, 1980); Edith Deen, All of the Women of the Bible (New

York, 1955). Diminutives do not appear on Rutman and Rutman's lists of the

fifteen most popular girls' and boys' names in Middlesex County, Virginia,

compiled for the period up to 1750 (A Place in Time, 86-87). Price's lists

of the twenty most popular girls' and boys' names in three English parishes

for parents who married within the years 1681-1740 also fail to show any

diminutives ("Child-Naming Patterns," 78, 81). Smith's list of the twenty

most common girls' names for parents who married within 1741-1780 includes

"Betsey" and "Nabby," but the previous cohort contains none. Equivalent

lists for boys show no diminutives in any of the four cohorts stretching to

1880 (Smith, "Child-Naming Practices," 565-566). David W. Dumas discusses

the new sources of names in "The Naming of Children in New England,

1780-1850," New England Historic Genealogical Register, LXXXII (1978),

198-201.

26 That genealogies favor fertile families has the effect of repressing the

duplication of names, thus imparting an upward bias to estimates of the

total number of names in circulation. Smith's comments on pool size of names

and the differences between the sexes with respect to names on the

Massachusetts tax list of 1771 parallel the genealogies' data for children

born before 1750, once we remember that tables 4 and 5 are reporting only

children not named for parents, grandparents, or deceased siblings.

27 Smith's Hingham lists add "Deborah" to the group of most popular names

("Sarah," "Mary," "Elizabeth," "Hannah," "Lydia," and "Abigail") for girls

born to parents marrying before 1741, but "Ann"/"Anna" is well down in the

order and "Thankful" does not appear among the top twenty (Smith,

"Child-Naming Practices," 566). Price, "Child-Naming Patterns, 1558-1740,"

66, 78; Rutman and Rutman, A Place in Time, 87. Leonard R. N. Ashley reports

the most popular names among gifts born in Charles Parish, York County,

Virginia, between 1648 and 1699 to be "Elizabeth," "Mary," "Ann," and

"Sarah," which accounted for 64% of all girls' names (What's in a Name?

Everything You Wanted to Know [Baltimore, 1989], 4).

28 Mary Ann Skinner offers fresh readings of Old Testament stories in

"Onomastics: Some Biblical and Literary Examples," Nexus: The Bimonthly

Newsletter of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, XI (1994),

25-28. See also Comay and Brownrigg, Who's Who in the Bible; Deen, All of

the Women of the Bible; Carol A. Newson and Sharon H. Ringe (eds.), The

Women's Bible Commentary (Louisville, 1992); William E. Phipps, Assertive

Biblical Women (Westport, 1992); Megan McKenna, Not Counting Women and

Children: Neglected Stories from the Bible (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1994).

29 This is Skinner's rendering of the story in Samuel I, 25. Fischer,

Albion's Seed, 95, seriously misrepresents Abigail's story. Skinner points

out that Abigail was wife number two for David, out of eight.

30 Smith has warned of "over-interpreting" differences between places, and

this argument may be taking the incidence of the name, "Abigail," too far.

Without a direct comparison of the variability in the English and Virginia

data with the New England set, the hypothesis cannot be tested one way or

another.

31 Smith, "Continuity and Discontinuity," 69; Christopher M. Jedrey, The

World of John Cleaveland: Family and Community in Eighteenth-Century New

England (New York, 1979), 85.

32 "Lucy" was a recent import, placing eighth among Hingham's most common

names in the period, 1741-1780. According to Hanks and Hodges, Dictionary of

First Names, "Lucy" appeared in England during the Middle Ages, but usage

"increased greatly in popularity in the 18th century" (s.v., 213).

33 Hanks and Hodges, Dictionary of First Names, passim; Dumas, "Naming of

Children," 196-210.

34 The intent behind the bestowal of diminutives on adult male slaves, for

instance, seems clear. Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and

the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York, 1990), argues that

women who no longer ran farms lost social respect because they were not

visibly contributing to household income.

35 The naming of children for deceased siblings did not cease; the custom

jumped significantly in the second quarter of the century in response to an

abrupt rise in childhood mortality that lasted approximately two decades.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX

MAYFLOWER GENEALOGIES

General Society of Mayflower Descendants, Mayflower Families Through Five

Generations, 5 v., plus several of the "Mayflower Families in Progress."

Founders: John Billington, James Chilton, Francis Eaton, Samuel Fuller,

Richard More, Thomas Rogers, George Soule, Myles Standish, William White,

and Edward Winslow.

White, Elizabeth Pearson, John Howland of the Mayflower (Camden, Maine,

1990, 1993), 2 v.

TOWNS

Bowen, Clarence Winthrop, History of Woodstock, Connecticut (1926-1935). VII

and VIII completed, with additions and corrections, by Donald Lines Jacobus

and William Herbert Wood (Worcester, Mass., 1943). The last two volumes are

the most complete.

Blodgette, George Brainard and Amos Everett Jewett, Early Settlers of

Rowley, Massachusetts (1933; repr. Somersworth, N.H., 1981).

Chamberlain, George Walter, History of Weymouth. III and IV, Genealogy of

Weymouth Families (1923), repr. as Genealogies of the Early Families of

Weymouth, Massachusetts (Baltimore, 1984).

Jacobus, Donald Lines (cross index by Helen Love Scranton), Families of

Ancient New Haven (Baltimore, 1974; orig. pub. 1923-1932), 3 v. This work

covers Wallingford, as well.

Stiles, Henry R., The History of Ancient Windsor, Connecticut. . . . I,

History and II, The Genealogy (1891, 1892; repr. Somersworth, N.H., 1976).

This work was supplemented by Elias Loomis, The Descendants of Joseph Loomis

Who Came from Braintree, England in the Year 1638 and Settled in Windsor,

Connecticut in 1639 (1875, 2d ed.) and Oliver S. Phelps and Andrew T.

Servin, The Phelps Family of America and Their English Ancestors . . .

(Pittsfield, Mass., 1899), 2 v.

Stiles, Henry R. and W. S. Adams, The History of ancient Wethersfield,

Connecticut. . . . I, History (1902); II, Genealogies and Biographies

(1904).

Genealogies of Rhode Island families in the data set, who were not

descendants of Mayflower passengers, come from the New England Historic

Genealogical Register CXLIII (1989), CXLVI (1992), and CXLVII (1993), as

well as from Genealogies of Rhode Island Families from Rhode Island

Periodicals (Baltimore, 1983), 2 v.

Gloria L. Main is Associate Professor of History, The University of

Colorado. She is the author of Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland

(Princeton, 1982); "Gender, Work, and Wages in Colonial New England,"

William and Mary Quarterly, LI (1994), 39-66.

The author wishes to thank Daniel Scott Smith and Barbara Davis for their

helpful contributions.