Favorite Names
Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: Favorite Name
My ancestors’ names are, for the most part, very standard English and Scottish names. Elizabeth and several of its common variations (Bessie, for example) is the most commonly used. The second, and most used male name is John, closely followed by William and James. Then come a variety of Jane/Janet/Jeans and Mary/Marie/Maria/Mariannes as the next most frequent for women. There were plenty of Agnes, Ann/Anne/Annie (no Anna’s), quite a few Isabelle/Isabella’s. Thomas, Robert, George occur often too. And there are Duncans and Alexanders and Emmas, Catherines, Sarahs and Margarets.
But the most unusual name, I might say the only unusual name and one I had never seen before, was Deodatus. When I first saw this name on the marriage record of my paternal grandmother, Emma Carr, I was amazed, and even more so to discover that he was named for his father. Deodatus Carr senior had a cousin of the same name. (https://tinyurl.com/yc866wfe ). The younger Deodatus Carr passed on the name to his third son, though in shortened form, as Datus. But that seems to be an end to it.
The name Deodatus is of Latin origin and is usually interpreted to mean "given to god". It is the name of a number of saints. When I googled its frequency as a boys’ name I found “This name is so rare in the U.S. that there is no data to graph,” though there are pages of Deodatus records on ancestry.com.
Since the Deodatuses in my family were from Oxford I was intrigued by a listing of people associated with Oxford University in the late 1500s and early 1600s (on Nancy's Baby Names , A history-focused baby name blog and directory) which included a table of male forenames ranked by frequency of occurrence from 1560 to 1621, but Deodatus did not make the top 65 names recorded. There was a Deodatus Staverton who enrolled at the University in 1604, in a list of rare names that popped up in the register just once, but the Carr Deodatuses, one must accept, had no connection with the University.
If asked to pick my favorites I would have to choose several that only occur once: Hazel, my sister’s name; Ian, my brother’s name; Jennifer and Heather (my daughters’ names), and Sheila (my own) a name I have always been content to own.
The thumb nail image is “Saint Deodatus of Nevers“. CatholicSaints.Info. 16 June 2017. Web. 8 August 2021. <https://catholicsaints.info/saint-deodatus-of-nevers/>