Namesakes and naming patterns

I knew almost nothing of my grandfather, my father’s father.  There had been a rift in the family, my father spoke little of his childhood or family, and both his parents had died before I was born.  Yet, in an act that suggests there was some wish for connection, my brother was named for our grandfather.  Robert and Hamilton were two of my brother’s given names.  And Robert Hamilton Macnee was my father’s father.  So I can for thank my big brother for helping to show the way towards this branch of our family.  

And while there are a couple of others with the name Robert Macnee, the Robert Hamilton Macnee name was not hard to find in the records.  Not that my grandfather made it easy for me, the family genealogist, for there are all too many ways of spelling his names, sometimes he would drop the last name, or put the middle name first.  And as for his age: for a certified public accountant he was awfully loose with numbers when it came to admitting how old he was.  

Robert is a name that runs through several generations of the Macnee (MacNie) family, and that too helped identify our family ancestry.  Robert Hamilton’s father was Robert, as was his wife’s father:  Robert Hamilton.  Ah, yet another namesake, so there is the origin of the middle name.  First cousins removed, second cousins removed, great great uncles – I am grateful to the Scottish naming pattern which uses the same names over and over again.  On the other hand it can be a trap too, when someone of the same name in the same village is found it isn’t always the person we are looking for.  But then that is the joy of genealogy, the detective work that helps us prove we are on the right track.