In my last post, I discussed the frequency of given names on my side of the family tree that I tabulated because I’m interested in that sort of thing. Today I’ll report on the frequency analysis of given names on my husband’s side of the family.

The first thing I realized when I sat down to review my data is that I’ve really been slacking off on research into my husband’s family in recent years, a fact which I hope to remedy in 2018. Moreover, I never finished updating my tree with some research sent to me by a couple of his cousins. However, this close to Christmas, that seems like a better project for January than for tonight, so I’m just going to use the data that I currently have in my spreadsheet.

My husband Bruce’s family is 100% Polish, by which I mean that all of his immigrant ancestors reported their ethnicity as Polish, and all of them were born within the borders of Poland today, as far back as I’ve traced. Consequently, we don’t need to develop any particular rules for dealing with German given names, or given names from any language other than Polish, for that matter. So the rules of the game are pretty similar to last time:

1. Equivalent versions of the same name in different languages (e.g. John, Jan, and Joannes) were counted in the same category.
2. In Polish culture dating from the mid 20th-century and earlier, the name “Maria” was revered as the name of the Mother of God, and it was considered inappropriate for parents to aspire to use this name for their daughter. Consequently, the name  Marianna, meaning, “like Mary,” was used instead. For the purpose of this analysis, Mary, Marie, Maria, and Marianna were all treated as equivalents and counted together.
3. Polish immigrants with names that were foreign to American ears often chose to use different names in the U.S. in their efforts to assimilate into American culture. Often they used the English version of the name of their baptismal patron saint, and for that reason, Polish men named Wojciech often became Albert or Adalbert in the U.S. However, some traditional Slavic names such as Stanisław, Czesław, Władysław, etc. do not have a precise English translation. While many men named Stanisław chose to use the name “Stanley” in the U.S., there was no requirement to do so, and some men chose very different names. In the case of Bruce’s family, his 2x-great-grandfather, Stanisław Lewandowski, chose to use the name “Edward” in the U.S. For the purpose of this analysis, I counted him under his baptismal name, Stanisław, rather than his adoptive name.
4. Only direct ancestors were counted.

The Results

The data included 48 men and 48 women born between about 1732 and the 1940s. In the category of male names, there was a marked deviation from the expected result, in that Albert/Adalbert/Wojciech was the most popular name in Bruce’s family, rather than John/Jan. In fact, John/Jan was only in third place, where it was tied in popularity with the name Stanisław. The name Joseph/Józef took second place. The names Anthony/Antoni and Stephen/Szczepan were tied for fourth place, and there was a four-way tie for fifth place between the names Andrew/Andrzej, Jacob/Jakub, Martin/Marcin, Michael/Michał.

Additional male names which each appeared once in the family tree were Augustine/Augustyn, Denis/Dionizy, Francis/Franciszek, Gary, Henry, Lawrence/Wawrzyniec, Louis/Ludwik, Matthew/Mateusz, Matthias/Maciej, Peter/Piotr, Simon/Szymon, Thaddeus/Tadeusz, Valentine/Waleny, and Vincent/Wincenty.

For female names, Marianna/Mary was the winner by a huge margin over second-place Catherine/Katherine/Katarzyna. Third place was a three-way tie between the names Agnes/Agnieszka (which didn’t even make the top 10 in my family), Anna, and Elizabeth/Elżbieta. Finally, the names Angeline/Aniela, Apolonia, Christine/Krystyna, Frances/Franciszka, and Joanna, came in with two votes each, creating a five-way tie for fourth place.

Additional names which appeared once each among Bruce’s female ancestors were Antonina, Dorothy/Dorota, Hedwig/Jadwiga, Helen/Helena, Josephine/Józefa, Justine/Justyna, Caroline/Karolina, Magdalena, Margaret/Małgorzata, Petronella, Thecla/Tekla, Theresa/Teresa, Rosalie/Rozalia, and Veronica/Weronika.

Putting the data together, I came up with this comparison of the top names in each family (those that appeared more than once). Names that appear in color are tied for the frequency with which they appeared; in other words, in my family, there were equal numbers of Andrews and Josephs.

Seven of the top names were the same in both families: John/Jan/Johann, Joseph/Józef, Michael/Michał, Jacob/Jakub, Andrew/Andrzej, Stanisław, and Wojciech. Robert, Henry, George/Georg and Frank/Franciszek made it into my list, whereas Anthony/Antoni, Stephen/Szczepan, and Martin/Marcin were more popular in Bruce’s family.

For the women, the names Marianna/Mary, Catherine/Katherine/Katarzyna, Anna, Elizabeth/Elżbieta, and Christina/Christiana/Krystyna/Christine made the list for both families, and beyond that, there were quite a few names that were more popular on one side of the family or the other.

What does all this mean? Not much, really, although it might shoot down my theory about the relative popularity of the name “Catherine” in my own family, versus the general population, since that name was the second-most popular in both families. However, whereas in my family, there were 19 women named Marianna/Mary and 16 named Catherine/Katarzyna, in Bruce’s family there were 11 women named Marianna/Mary, and only 4 named Catherine/Katarzyna, so it still seems to be relatively more popular in my family. Although it’s not possible to draw too many conclusions based on such a small sample, it’s certainly interesting to take a look at the names that our ancestors chose for their children. I can imagine all the new mothers in my family and Bruce’s, raising their children in small villages or larger towns in what is now Poland, Germany, France, Canada, or the U.S., cradling their newborns in their arms and bestowing on those children the most beautiful, noble, saintly, or strong names they could think of, and dreaming of the men and women these little ones would become.

And if nothing else, I will be well-prepared for that casual inquiry about popular given names in our family tree, the next time someone in the family is having a baby!

© Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz 2017