Great Western Coffee Shop

I have been working with Lisa through her database for the 1911 Melksham census today ... the most popular girl's names were Sarah, Edith, Elizabeth and - top of all - Mary (162 of them). The most popular boy's names were Henry, George, Frederick, and there were no less that 314 Williams.

Unique female names - Isabella, Gerty, Eveline, Rebecca, Mollie, Winnifred, Ethelwyn, Evelene, Mercy, Adria, Leslie, Frederica, Zadia, Phillis, Talitha, Freda, Celia, Naomi, Angelina, Awdry, Elvira, Marianne, Ettie, Lulu, Ernestine, Ina, Emmeline, Queenie, Mercia, Maggie, Margary, Annette, Millie, Victor, Francis, Aimee, Cissily, Cecilia, Kitty, Lotta, Alfred, Rosalie, Laurie, Lettice, Hettie, Sara, Emmiline, Sybella, Ernie, Jenny, Helene, Dulcis, Adelene, Blanch, Rosanna, Roma, Ophelia, Lilly, Hebe, Susie, Maude, Vando, Roberta, Guida, Arabella, Lilyian, Violetta, Lillie, Milly, Mervyn, Helena, Rita, Joyce, Ira, Sabina, Cordelia, Selena, Cicely, Alicia, Jessica, Netta, Erina, Gertie, Sissie, Betsey, Monica, Christiana, Isabell, Eileen, Constance and Jemima.

Unique male names - Joey, Reggie, Lloyd, Ida, Israel, Winter, Ernie, Kerwin, Oswald, Kirwin, Elisha, Desmond, Moses, Josiah, Jethro, Mager, Winship, Aeneas, Leonare, Archelaus, King, Stafford, Denis, Guy, Ephram, Jerry, Allan, Jabez, Bertrand, Heber, Putt, Zenas, Ottridge, Raymond, Harrold, Adolphus, Llewellyn, Oscar, Fredrick, Abel, Meredith, Alonzo, Lambert, Ford, Rex, Laurence, Theodore, Louis, Simeon, Silas, Elam, Angus, Jasper, Rodney, Egbert, Phineas, Steven, Grace, Randolph, Amos, Valentine, Ediss, Harvey, Vincent, Wilmot, Ted, Lewin, Leamon, Norval, Bygad, Dan, Seymour, Aylesbury, Iris, Agnes, Matthew, Wodehouse, Philip, Elihu, Ettose, Duncan, Graham, Jeremiah and Luther.

I see I appear in the list (!) - does anyone else here?

Lots of names that wouldn't be considered unique today, but some of those unique girls names would today perhaps be unique boys names- Ernie, Alfred, Victor, Mervyn etc

Indeed.  We spent some time checking these on the database and there really does appear to have been a habit of christening a girl with a boy's name - followed by one or more clearly feminine middle names.

Nope, but I have a first name that is rarely used these days. Not a rare name, but one you are unlikely to have if you're under 50.

And no, it's not Gary!

Tarquin.?..

When I spent a lot of time working with personal data you got to the point where you had a pretty good idea of peoples decade of birth by their names. Tended to be more so with the ladies than with the gentlemen.

I would have picked Walter, Ernest, Albert, and Frederick (in full) as boys' (i.e. expected to be male) names that have almost died out - but according the the nso (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/babynamesenglandandwales/2018#oliver-and-olivia-remained-the-most-popular-baby-names-in-2018) (the definitive way of checking, as it's based on registrations not journalism) the last two have renaissed in the last few years. Which just shows how fickle fashion is.

With girls' names the choice is bigger, and "let's pick a pretty name for a pretty girl" enters the reckoning, and I think the fashion cycle is a bit more evident. But Edith, Ethel, Gladys, Mildred, etc. don't seem likely to come back any time soon the way Emma, Matilda, Abigail etc. did.

Nope, far more "normal" than that!

Arthur?

Another, perhaps surprising, disappearance is Christopher. It was big in the 1950s (I knew loads of Chrisses ay school), having been rare before, and remained popular until an even higher peak in the 1980s before vanishing.

Nope, again. To (hopefully) stop the guessing, I will say that my name was mentioned in a song by The Undertones, and a gerbil was named after me in a well-known kids TV show of the 1980's! 

"Kevin" perchance?

Dunno, Jackie and Jimmy are both fairly unusual nowadays, while not being unusual names in themselves; unless Jimmy is actually "Jimmy Jimmy"!

I'm in the unique list.

Excellent.  ;D

Could be My Favourite Cousin

His ma bought him a Hornby O gauge
Thought it was just a passing stage
Now he's making lots of noise
Playing around with the Coffee Shop boys

Don't get carried away!

It's only a small sample of one census district - 10-20,000 I'd guess - or if it's only the town itself even fewer. Being a census, the names won't all be as registered or christened either; what people provided varied a lot as to full "proper" names vs. everyday or family ones, whether enumerators tidied up the form or spelling varied too. In 1911 each form was filled in by the householder, leading to more mistakes, bad writing, misunderstandings, etc. One quite easy one to do is to put the age in the wrong column, so changing the sex - and it's also not too hard to write "son" and "dau" so it could be either! (At least one on the list above arose like that.)

And then there's all the issues of transcription (enumerators were not all chosen for their clear hand). And for those with "good" handwriting there's the "curse of italic"; once that style becomes dominant in the later 1800s some letter pairs become effectively the same. In my Mum's family is a bunch called Mouser, or is that Monser? Non-one at the GRO could tell, so they were often indexed under both names (not so unusual for surnames, but rare for given names). Looking at the originals, I can't tell either until later on when the typewriter arrives. Plus of course there's Graham's transfer of the list into a post (unless that was automated).

In 1911 the literacy rate among older residents would not have been that high either, so the concept of "right spelling" of their name could be problematic. There was an Evelyn Bennett in Suffolk in the 1870s - at least that's how it was usually spelled. His birth was registered as Evelin (as was first census) and his marriage as Eveylen (in the GRO indexes). When asked in court how it should be spelled, he replied "I'm blowed if I know!". Neither he nor his father did spellings, of course.

You are totally correct at the difficulties and limited volume of the data - 5,692 in the sample.  A massive amount of effort has gone into being as correct as possible - but the underlying data, as you say, is handwritten, flakey, what the people told the enumerators. Lisa does link though from one census to the next - but then if spelt differently, which is "right" anyway.

The data was extracted from the database and then the counting and sorting was automated.  And that process threw up a number of "are you sure" which allowed the data to be further cleaned - but it still isn't, and never will be, spotless.

Now ... if you start looking at ages, surnames, etc across censuses and contemporary newspaper articles, you start finding some very interesting things, lies, and skeletons and scandals in the cupboard.

If those names have all been verified against the written original, that does remove one major source of errors, as you say. I tried looking for a few of them and in fact most didn't come up in either of the main transcriptions. I think that illustrates something else - that transcribers often tried to correct what looked wrong, and in the process often "corrected mistakes" that were nothing of the kind.

As another example, a female cousin of my father's was called Cecil - we don't know why (it was a rather odd bit of the family). But it was always pronounced "Seesil", which you'd never find out from written sources. Nor are you likely to find out (even in newspapers) if someone was in reality known as something different from the official names that went down on all the forms - like my Dad's uncle Dan; only ever called Robert officially.

Is your name S.P.G?
 ;D

johnneyw and oxonhutch are on the money - not many of us Kev's left now (young ones anyway)  :'(

See you! SPG was a Glaswegian Hamster 😎

Not sure how to spell your own name still exists. I knew somebody who is probably still alive, name spelt differently between birth and marriage certificate.
I have recently read a paper from the Proceedings of the Huguenot Society which went on in great depth about spelling and transcription, compounded by illiteracy; and original names and pronunciations being French which invariably threw the English recorders. And then followed up on suggestions as to how to handle "mistakes".

Slightly (by Coffee Shop standards) off at a tangent, when as a student I delivered milk to earn some cash during the summer long vacation in the 1970s I delivered milk to a household where the male (nominal?) head of  the household was called "Sissal" by his wife (knowledge derived from the orders she barked at him when he answered the door to me on collecting days). Is this a local Thames Valley or an archaic pronunciation of Cecil? 

Maybe she was raised south of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees.

Rudyard and I spent many a year down there.

Very much so - names go in and out of fashion, and some stay out of fashion whilst others come back for a another go.

As you may recall from other posts, I have been more silent than usual on here for the last 3 months or so because of a major genealogy project I have involved myself in. And when you get back to your great⁴ grandparents, there are 64 of the blighters to identify! But in so doing a number of matters perhaps pertinent to this thread have come up:

1. Virtually every Gertrude that ever lived in the UK was born between 1870 and 1890 and died 70 to 90 years later

2. Names like Benjamin and Sarah were only carried by very old people when I was a lad, but they both came back into vogue in the 1970s

3. In years gone by illiteracy was very commonplace amongst the general population, and those reporting a birth might not have been in a position to check what the Registrar was writing, or indeed be able to spell the name in question anyway. A distant relative of mine was registered at Newent in 1869 with the name Kizir Gooch. Her name was actually Kezia, but anyone familiar with a thick north Gloucestershire accent will appreciate how "Kezia" could sound like "Kizir" to an outsider's ear under certain circumstances.

4. Some unusual names I have come across were actually surnames from a previous generation eg. a mother's or grandmother's maiden surname. For eaxmple, a James Henry Godwin Roe born in Cheltenham in 1846 had his mother's maidem name thrown in for good measure.

5 Some contrivances were cross-gender constructions. My mother's maternal grandfather was called Albert, so one of her middle names was Alberta. Nothing to do with Canada at all as it turned out ;D

Indeed ... and there's a massive amount of evidence of trends of all sorts in the data - it's a fascinating story.

Every day, Lisa posts births, marriages and deaths from her database onto Facebook - and has quite a following. On a typical day, her database will report ten marriages but for today (25th December) that number has soared to 68.  That's data from Victorian times and the early 20th century, and the database does not pretend to list everyone with Melksham connections who got married - there are those out of area who ran away to Greta Green or had civil weddings, and a number of church registers are not yet published due to the 100 year rule and it taking a long time for registers to fill - but it does give a good comparative.

Why did so many people get married on Christmas Day?  Was it casual marriages of people who had got inebriated on sherry left out for Santa?  Was it men making honest women of partners while everyone else's eyes were turned to Christmas?   Neither of these - with so little holiday from work, Christmas was about the only time of year that the whole family could gather to help the happy couple celebrate, and perhaps the only tim they could slip off for a couple of days honeymoon in nearby seaside resorts such as Severn Beach, Barry or Clevedon.

Whilst civil marriages were posible from 1837 onward they were still quite unusual back in those days. Many people didn't consider themselves "properly married" unless a clegyman was involved.

It would also be very difficult to list everybody with connections to an individual place because, amongst other reasons, the practice of sending young women off into domestic service, and that might not necessarily mean that they stayed local to their original area. One of my great great grandmothers spent some time as a servant in London, despite being born and bred in Cheltenham, and indeed returned there upon her mattiage. Given that Cheltenham was full of pretty well-heeled people in the 19th century, one could fully understand somebody knowing of a position in London for a parlour maid or whatever, and making an appropriate recommendation. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Bath attracted teenage women from around the country for the same reasons. And of course, some may have found a suitable bloke in their new part of the country, got married and stayed put.

Similar considerations applied to some young men who set off to seek their fortunes elsewhere, such as one of my great great grandfathers who migrated from Sweffling, Suffolk to Longhope, Gloucestershire, sometime between 1851 and 1861.


Whilst I can see some of your logic about Christmas Day being a day off, so was every Sunday (if being forced by convention to go to church three times a day in both examples would count for many people as a "day off" even then), and I suspect Christmas Day weddings had more to do with religious significance than anything else. There were very few casual marriages indeed back then because divorce was not really possible for anybody but the very rich (hence the old saying "marry in haste, repent at leisure")

Also bear in mind that the vast majority of married women didn't work in those days (indeed, in many professions women were expected to stop working when they married), so there would always have been a pool of mothers and aunts and sisters who would have been called upon to deal with all of the arrangements. And as regards time off, many people could get time off quite easily (agricultural workers, for example, generally had a slack period from late Autumn until early Spring, and some may have been laid off anyway). The main issue, and this was the case even up to WW2, was that people generally didn't get paid leave. In general then, for the majority, honeymooms were low-key and fairly short affairs, if indeed they happened at all.

And to be homest, nobody in their right mind would have gone to Severn Beach on honeymoon even if there were any guest houses in the area. It was really a GWR construct in the 1920s and always concentrated on day trippers from Bristol until that trade generally dried up in the 1960s. Only the wealthy would have considered a holiday at the seaside, and if they were wealthy in our neck of the woods, there were better places to go than Barry or Clevedon ;)

Not bang in the middle of Severn Beach but the New Passge hotel was very nearby, opening in 1863 and very accessible by train. For honeymoons though? Well, it looked very different then.
BTW, many years ago as teenagers, we explored the, by then, abandoned and collapsing hotel on a couple of nights. Reckless beyond belief when I recall it's wobbly state, especially upstairs. It's now been replaced by housing.

Considering the marriages on Christmas Day ... "Also bear in mind that the vast majority of married women didn't work in those days".   Hmm - formally, not - but they were very much involved in supporting their husbands and in many cases perhaps worked harder.  Not only in supporting their husbands in what they did, perhaps as a small business or contact worker, but also in bringing up the family; no washing machines and it all had to be done by hand, no running hot water and it had to be brought in with buckets, no internet and no cars and people had to walk out to collect their food and other requirements and carry them home, with no freezers to slash the frequency of these chores.  The census enumerators, though, rarely described all the supporting services provided by the wife as a profession.

I suspect that the Christmas wedding surge was a combination of practicality and religious significance.

Severn Beach was brought up somewhat tongue in cheek.  Weston or Weymouth more popular??

I had this feeling that Weymouth was about to make an appearance!

Hmmm indeed. And you missed a few things off that list, not the least of which was being almost permanently pregnant over their fertile years. But - and it's a big but - we are talking at least 100 years ago when things were very very different from how we see them today.

And that applied of course to both sexes. We may do well to recall what WW1 veteran Harry Patch had to say about going over the top. "You had about six seconds to make up your mind whether to go over to face almost certain death, or stay behind and be shot by your own side for cowardice." And a lot of those in that situation were lads still in their late teens and would be considered little more than children by society today.

I meant, and I am sure you knew I meant really, that women generally did not work for an employer after marriage in those days.

But there were, in a way, some small upsides compared to what we have today. There was a baker and a butcher in most villages, and local farmers would sell their produce to the locals rather than send it off to market (where much of the perishable stuff would have gone off by the time it got there anyway). If you did live somewhere more remote the chances were that somebody with a horse and cart would come round every week and sell you provisions at your door. To an extent I witnessed the last vestiges of that way of life when I was a lad - my mother went to the shops, about a 5-minute walk away, virtually every morning clutching her shopping bag, and if all of what she wanted wouldn't fit in the bag that day, then she bought it the following day.
 

That wouldn't have happened until the railways came, and even when they did...
It is about 70 miles from Melksham to Weymout, or 140 miles return. Even on a Parliamentary train at 1d per mile, to get two people there and back would have cost £1..3s..4d, with any accommodation costs on top of that of course. And if you were earning between £2 and £3 per week, that is half of a week's wages gone in one go. Of course, if your new father in law was better off and your new wife came with a dowry (you know, those amounts of money paid in ancient days by men to other men to take what were considered useless daughters off their hands...) that might have been a different matter. :)

Always remember the old saying "the past is a foreigh country. They do things differently there."

I hear you! I've encountered almost all these issues in family tree research. If you don't mind "Carry On" humour, in my family tree can be found a "Fanny Gardener", a "Fanny Hoare" and a "Dick Basher" (all names, not occupations) and a Newey Ould (offspring of the union of a Mr Ould and Ms Newey). Recent colleagues include Messers Fatfat (who isn't), and Phuc Ngo....

Excuse me!  :o

I was born in March 1959 and was named Christopher.  Somewhere, I have an original cutting from the Times, or the Telegraph, announcing my birth. ::)

The Coffee Shop forum member now known as Chris from Nailsea. ;)

Chris, fairly Regular name,

From,  Very uncommon middle name,

Nailsea, well I know of no other Mr (Mrs, or Miss) Nailsea so I'd say an uncommon surname.   ;D ;D

Lovely Name, 

Several Tarquin's (surname Gin) in my local Pub.

Oh for the day when my local reopens!  ???