A Rose by Any Other Name ...

I confess that I'm not familiar with the scent of new-born babies, beyond the mere existence of the phenomenon, so I'm not going to comment on the second part of Shakespeare's famous line!  The first half is enough to announce my theme with accuracy.

During the past week or two I've been looking into the family of one Albert Flatman, who has two links to my family, being the father-in-law of my grandfather's brother, and also the brother-in-law to said grandfather's uncle.  Albert had the dubious pleasure of a somewhat unusual second name, Seymour.  That said, some of my discoveries associated with the rest of his family, vary from uncommon to rare, to the frankly bizarre!

Albert Seymour Flatman married Edna Florence Pemberton on the 8th April, 1897 and promptly started building their family of six children.  Doris, Joyce, Nigel, Muriel, Evelyn and Lorna don't sound too far from usual, and the same can be said of five of their choices for second names: Emily, Violet, Albert, Ivy and Harriett, but Muriel Mona had my eyelids elevating slightly, though unaware of the delights to come.

In 1919, Doris, the eldest, was the first to marry, and she and her husband, Arthur Ernest Button carried on this trend, calling their firstborn Monica Inez Audrey Edna - as if two or three forenames weren't sufficient!  Monica's siblings couldn't compete, being accorded a mere two each, and by the time baby Carl arrived in 1935, the second-name well had run dry.  Monica led the way into the next generation, finding a husband named Peter Geale Dickson, whom she married in 1941.  Not to be outdone, Carl managed to carry the unusual into the dimension of surnames, by marrying in 1961 Pauline M Oban.  I presume she or her family were Scottish.

Joyce and my great-uncle Frederick could only manage the 'less common', calling their only son Clive Frederick.

In 1929, Nigel Albert married a girl with the delightfully informal name of Sinfi Eva, which I first thought was Cynthia, misheard by the registrar, until I found not only that it followed her through life (although her death registration entry of Sini E was tagged 'gender unknown'), but that there were also a few more examples of the name.  Sinfi was the eldest child of of a horse dealer named Algar Taylor; he passed his name to his second son, who completed the circle by marrying Nigel's sister Evelyn Ivy the following year.

Muriel Mona married one James S G Dann, whose middle names included his mother's maiden name Grapes.  Unfortunately his father's handwriting fooled those who transcribed the 1911 census, and changed it to Grayes - equally unknown as a forename.  That family schedule kept giving.  I couldn't believe that James's mother and sister were named Milby, so I had to look at the original more closely, and discovered that mum was Milly Elizabeth and sister was Milly Madeline Beatrice.  However, there wasn't an equally accommodating explanation for the younger sister named Councy Elizabeth, whose registration I found confirmed by the GRO website.

After all this excitement, Albert and Edna's youngest daughter, Lorna Harriett played a safety shot, marrying one Charles James Wharton.  It wasn't without its own originality, though.  This name offered several matches in 1911, the nearest of which was a family headed by Charles and Jane Wharton.  The GRO website revealed that Charles James' mother's maiden name was Fulcher, so I could resort to finding his parents' marriage to make sure I had the right census entry.   And it was here that I almost came unstuck, for there was no marriage within an appropriate date range for Charles Wharton and Jane Fulcher.  Before panicking, however, I removed Jane and looked again at the one result in the right area.  One of the two possible brides of Charles John Wharton was Sarah Jane Fulcher.  How often have we found people known by their second name instead of the first?  It's certainly not as uncommon as some of the names I've seen this week!