Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:
It's Saturday Night again -
time for some more Genealogy Fun!!
Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):
1) We all have many names (given, middle, surname, nickname) in our ancestry, whether we know all of them or not.
2) Do you have "A Name That Runs in Your Family" Is there a first name — or nickname — that keeps repeating generation after generation in your tree? Share the name, the pattern, and your best guess as to why it stuck.
3) Share your information about your repeating name in your own blog post, writing a comment on this blog post, or put it in a Substack post, Facebook Note, or some other social media system. Please leave a comment on this post so others can find it.
Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for this idea.
Here's mine:
My immigrant Seaver ancestor is Robert Seaver (1608-1683) (my 9th great-grandfather) who came from England on the ship Mary and John and settled in Roxbury, Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634. I don't know his parents or siblings name or even where in England he came from.
Robert Seaver married late in 1634 to Elizabeth Ballard, but their first child came in 1640. They named him Shubael *also "Shewball," "Subael," "Shubal," etc. in the records. Google Gemini 3 gave me the origin and meaning of the name:
Shubael (pronounced shoo-bay-uhl) is a name of ancient Hebrew origin.
In the original Hebrew, it is written as שׁוּבָאֵל (Shuba’el) or שְׁבוּאֵל (Shebuel). The name is a combination of two Hebrew root words:
The Prefix: Derived either from shub (meaning "to return," "to turn back," or "to restore") or shaba (meaning "to take captive").
The Suffix: El, which means "God".
Because of these overlapping linguistic roots, Hebrew scholars generally translate the name to mean "Returned to God," "Restored of God," or "Captive of God".
I have no idea if Robert Seaver had a father, grandfather, brother, uncle or someone else with the name, but Shubael (my 8th great-grandfather) got it.
- When he married Hannah Wilson in 1668, he named his third son Shubael Seaver (1679-1757), who married Abigail Twelves in 1704.
- Shubael and Abigail (Twelves) named their first son Shubael Seaver (1705-????), who married Mary Rogers in 1734.
- Shubael and Mary (Rogers) Seaver named their first son Shubael Seaver (1740-1826), who married Deliverance Hyde in 1763.
- Shubael and Deliverence (Hyde) Seaver named their first son Shubael Seaver (1773-1828), and married Sarah Pierce in 1799.
- Shubael and Sarah (Pierce) Seaver named their first son Shubael Seaver (1804-????), who probably died young and never married.
Those SIX Shubael Seavers are the only men with that given name in my Seaver database. It ran in the family continuously for 160 years.
I need to add the name origin to my Biography of Shubael Seaver (1640-1730) in ABC Biography of Shubael Seaver (1640-1730) and Hannah (Wilson) Seaver (1646-1722) of Massachusetts.
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Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver
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