A Name That Runs in the Family
Randy Seaver’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge this week asks us to think about the names that appear again and again in our family trees.
Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):
- We all have many names (given, middle, surname, nickname) in our ancestry, whether we know all of them or not.
- Do you have “A Name That Runs in Your Family?” Is there a first name—or nickname—that keeps repeating generation after generation in your tree? Share the name, the pattern, and your best guess as to why it stuck.
At first, several names immediately came to mind:
- Noah Briles
- Nelson Crawford
- John Foster
But as I looked more closely at each line, none of them turned out to be the best answer.
Noah Briles
When I think of the Briles family, the name Noah Briles immediately comes to mind. There are numerous descendants of Noah Briles, son of John Briles and Nancy Beckerdite, who continued using the name through later generations.
However, that isn’t my direct Briles line.
My second great-grandfather was Noah Washington Briles, but he was almost certainly named for his maternal grandfather, Noah Rush, rather than for an uncle named Noah. While the name appears frequently among collateral relatives, it isn’t a name that consistently passed down my direct ancestral line.
Nelson Crawford
My Crawford family presents a similar puzzle.
The name James appears repeatedly throughout the extended Crawford family. My fourth great-grandfather was James Crawford, yet surprisingly few of his descendants continued using James as a given name.
Instead, I found two descendants carrying the name Nelson, the name of James Crawford’s only son.
For years I’ve hoped that my third great-grandfather, Nelson G. Crawford, was named after his paternal grandfather. Unfortunately, Y-DNA evidence has shown that the line of Nelson Crawfords descending from David Crawford is not my Crawford family, making that explanation unlikely.
John Foster
Another name that seemed promising was John Foster.
My Revolutionary War ancestor, Rev. John Foster, certainly wasn’t the only John in the family. His father was Thomas Foster, and his grandfather was John Foster III, showing that John had already become an established family name several generations earlier.
While the name repeats, it occurs farther back in the pedigree than I initially realized.
The Winner: Hiram M. Currey
It wasn’t until I stepped back and looked at my pedigree chart that the answer became obvious.
I have four consecutive generations of men named Hiram M. Currey.
- My great-grandfather was Hiram Miles Currey.
- His father was Hiram M. Currey of Leavenworth, Kansas.
- Although additional documentation is still needed, I believe his father was Hiram M. Currey, the attorney who practiced in Peoria, Illinois.
- Land records strongly suggest that the Peoria attorney was the son of Hiram Mirick Currey (or Curry) of Champaign County, Ohio.
Even more interesting, the tradition appears to extend beyond those four direct generations.
Hiram Mirick Currey is believed to have been the son of Thomas Currey and Phebe Sample. Although I have not yet completed research on all of their descendants, my database already contains thirteen descendants named Hiram, along with one additional individual who carries Hiram as a middle name. Of those thirteen Hirams, ten have the middle initial “M.”
Sometimes the answer to a genealogy question isn’t the name we immediately think of. Looking beyond the obvious candidates reminded me that family naming traditions can hide in plain sight—and occasionally they reveal themselves only after stepping back to look at the entire family tree.