Naming patterns are an excellent tool to support our family groups and feel confident that they are complete and correct. When children are born today, many new parents select a name for the child based solely on personal preference. The same does not hold true for our ancestors. Throughout Protestant Europe our ancestors relied on firm naming patterns for their children. The typical rules are illustrated as follows:
| Child | Named After |
| First-born son | Paternal grandfather |
| Second-born son | Maternal grandfather |
| First-born daughter | Maternal grandmother |
| Second-born daughter | Paternal grandmother |
| Subsequent children | Other family members |
The order of the grandparents may be switched, but the oldest two sons would be named for the grandfathers and the oldest two daughters would be named for the grandmothers. Subsequent children were named after aunts or uncles or other significant individuals in the family. Biblical names could also be used for later children. On occasion things get interesting and an Old Norse god may be recognized in the names of later children, like Thor or Freyja.
It was common practice to reuse a child’s name if he/she died before adulthood. This means you could see a family with a few sons named Peder, but don’t panic and think that you have grabbed children from another family. This is just a great hint that you need to search burial records for the first little Peders’ deaths.
I’ve come to notice another interesting practice over my years of research that will be easiest to explain with an example. Let’s say we have a husband and wife named Hans and Maren. Hans dies and Maren then marries a man named Soren. Maren and Soren have a son together. They name him Hans after Maren’s first husband who is deceased. There is a common tradition in second (or third, etc) marriages of naming the first child of the same gender as the deceased spouse after that deceased spouse. This is something we would never consider doing today. It’s important to remember that the past is a foreign country and our practices and understandings today cannot be imposed on our ancestors.
These given name patterns are a great way to ensure that we are getting the full family puzzle solved. As the children’s names are determined you will begin to see that each generation locks into place. You can rule out children that belong to other families and you can see where you may have holes in your research.