What was in a name? Naming practices and individual behaviour in the past

Francisco Beltrán, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Gifting a baby with a personal name is a universal cultural phenomenon that is attached with a highly symbolical value. Although the pool of potential names is theoretically infinite, the range of names traditionally used has been quite limited because the choice of a specific name was bound by the existing cultural practices. In historical Europe, for instance, many children were named after either their close relatives (parents, grandparents, godparents or deceased siblings) or cherished religious figures (including the local patron or the saint of the day of birth). Parents had nonetheless the last word and the degree to which they conform to those practices speaks a great deal about their characteristics and preferences. Naming decisions were therefore probably related to individual factors (such as religious, social or political values) and can therefore signal the care that parents devoted to their children, the way they raised them or the importance they attached to education or other values. Using both parish registers from a small rural area in North Eastern Spain between 1750 and 1950 (c. 60,000 obs.) and the Population Census of the province of Zaragoza in 1860 (c. 400,000 obs.), this article explores whether names are able to predict individual outcomes. Our results show that particular categories of names were indeed linked to the probability of dying during infancy/childhood and of attending school/being literate. Interestingly, these results vary by sex, socio-economic status and date of birth, thus providing a complex picture of how “unobserved” factors affect individual behaviour.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 129. The Politics of Language