Monday, September 28, 2009

Unique Baby Names in Canadian History

I am such a sucker for information like this... have you seen the Ancestry.ca Press Release on Ancestry.ca Reveals the Most Unique Baby Names in Canadian History? Somehow this didn't come across my email inbox, but it came across John D. Reid's Inbox and he posted some of the names on his Anglo-Celtic Connections blog here.

Karen Peterson, Marketing Director for Ancestry.ca commented: “Searching through historical records has never been more fun or easy, thanks to the online preservation and indexing of family history records such as censuses, birth and marriage records, passenger lists and immigration records.”

This is a pretty good, but clean, list of names! I especially liked:

* Duck McPhee - born 1857, and lived for 64 years - a long life, for a Duck (from Ontario French Catholic Church Records/Drouin Collection, 1747-1967) --wouldn't that be perfect for Donald Duck's family tree?

* Myholy Cupid - a 24-year-old recent Polish immigrant to Canada, working 40-plus hour work weeks as a street labourer, sharing a lodge with other Polish immigrants (from 1911 Census of Canada) -- perhaps named Myholy after being shot by Cupid's arrow?

* Jester MacNut - lived in Colchester, Nova Scotia (from 1891 Census of Canada) -- you'd have to be a lown to even carry the name MacNut, right?

Has anyone checked to see if these are really the names in the census?

Thanks to Ancestry.ca for adding more examples to my "Genealogy is Fun! Seriously." presentation.

1 comment:

Drew Smith said...

Jester MacNut is one of 3 Jesters in the 1891 Census of Canada. (One of the others is "Jester Pushie".)

Jester was the 8-month-old son of David and Adline MacNut. (And that's exactly how the census taker spelled it.)

The mystery of Jester's real name seems to be solved by finding the same family in the 1901 census. There, the now McNutt family appears with 10-year-old *Chester*.

As for Mr. Cupid, I would imagine that his first name, being Polish, merely *sounded* like "Myholy" (and perhaps his last name only sounded like "Cupid"). But that's exactly how the census taker wrote them down.