s/o DNA & Family Trees-Odd, Unusual Names You've Discovered

I have a Theron & Sophronia, too. Some that sound odd to us today, really weren't odd at all for their time or place, but yeah, they still aren't names I'm looking to pass on to my kids.

I have Wellington, Philander, Egbert, Ebenezer, Banfield, Zipron, Cyprian, Sypian, Manassa, & Roscoe for guys. For the ladies I also have Dillie, & Jemima.

DH's family has Thankful, Patience, Experience, & Freelove.


But mostly, due to a huge portion of my family tree is Italian or Irish, I have 112,700 relatives named Mary or Maria.    

(I do have some interesting ones on the Italian side.  Not just the typical Luigi, Vincenzo, Alessandro, Rosa, Maria, etc., but Attanasio, Diodato, Palmina, & Gilda.   The Irish names are brutally boring and repetitive.  Seriously.  All of the kids had to have nicknames just to know who in the world you were talking about.   William, Francis, John, & Patrick----over, and over, and over again.  The girls were all Mary, Bridget, & Alice.)

My paternal grandfather's name was Green and his father was named Pink

Ahh.. I have a daughter obsessed with Hamilton, The Musical. "Dear Theodosia" is a song sung by Leslie Odom Jr who plays Aaron Burr. It's the name of his wife and his eldest daughter. Just a bit of history.

Nimrod

We have a Squire!

That's the best one

Hmm, well nothing so exotic as what's been posted. My family is 2/3 Jewish 1/3 Catholic so my ancestors mostly have religious names. They're all European - from the former Austro -Hungarian empire, so some of the names are still unusual.

Women's names include Honorcia, Dobrisz, Biene Liebe and Maria Magdalena.
Among the men there are scores of Josef, Johann, Jakob and Georg. The most usual men's name is probably Lazar or Lazarus.

I don't have to dig too far for some of the names. We have:
Fama (my mom, she hated her name)
Mossie
Conard (not Conrad)
Billie (female)
Lodia
Minnie
Efrum

My great grand mothers middle name is Cinderella.

DH has a (distant) step-cousin named Cinderella - I don't think I've seen it spellt the same way twice in the records

I've seen several names like that.  Even the basic names such as Catherine can show up differently on every record you find.   On one census it's Catherine, another it's Katie, the birth record says Catharine, and the death certificate says Kate.  

One thing to remember is sometimes people didn't read or write, or at least didn't read or write English.  So they didn't know a "correct" spelling of their name.  they just knew their name as it sounded.  So basically every person who wrote their name down on a record wrote it as they thought it should be spelled.


As a side note, while I have yet to find any people named Cinderella on my tree, I have found people who lived on a road named Cinderella.    (The street no longer exists, unfortunately.  That would have been a fun photo to add to their information.)  It made searching in newspaper archives a bit easier.  instead of searching their name, which was difficult to search by because it was also a common word,  I just searched for "Cinderella".     The road wasn't terribly long, so it was a faster way to find articles about the family.

I have no idea - perhaps just a mum who loved the name from the faery tale?  She was born in 1840 New Jersey.

I come from Mormon pioneers. It would be easier to find a name people didn't think was unusual.

And they're all close cousins, no doubt.