Last night while I was looking for people who had been "missed" (their work is ready, but not done), I discovered something cool about my Bell line. My husband's family has a joke that all they know how to spell is "Carl Day," (seriously they have 5 generations in a row where somebody has the name or a variation in every generation). In my family they couldn't spell anything but James Bell. Starting as far back as I have names for there are 4 of 7 generations where my direct ancestors name is "James Bell," and in at least one of the generations where my direct ancestor isn't James Bell, his brother's name is James. Then if you expand out another generation, you get my brother whose middle name is James.
There are four generations where there is no son named James (mine, my fathers and two more), which makes me wonder if there's a fluke (like the uncle James did something really dumb and they didn't want to name after him), or if I'm missing a child; based on the numbers of children in those generations, either is definitely possible. There's also a chance that their cousins living next door beat them to the name.
This tradition would have a good chance of making it easier to find the next generation if James Bell wasn't quite so popular. Maybe not as much in Scotland in the 17th century, we'll see how the search goes.
No comments:
Post a Comment