SNGF - Saturday Night Genealogy Fun with Names

Once again a personal post topic - and once again I'm a bit late for Saturday night. I was out celebrating with family and friends last night - that's my excuse this time.

Over at Genea-Musings, Randy Seaver for his Saturday Night Genealogy Fun asked us to:

1)  Go to the Baby Name Wizard site and see how popular your name was over the 20th century, and how popular a baby name it is today.  Check out your spouse, your children and your grandchildren (if you have some!) also. 

2)  What does your name mean (find out on http://www.babynamewizard.com/baby-name)?

3)  Tell us about it, and show us your graphs, in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, in a Facbook status or a Google+ Stream post.

Here goes -

According to the wizard, my name's popularity as I spell it, seems to have peaked in the 1950s - after my naming time! (These stats, I believe, are mostly, if not all, from the United States.)  I never really liked my name but others must have, or at least their parents did.

Since there are name variations, I did do as Randy did and searched for Dian* names. (I did take a look at Deanne, Deana, Deanna too but maybe that was cheating, since I wouldn't pronounce those the same way. They sound better than plain Diane though, and I did attempt to change my name's spelling once to something like Deanne, but people just wouldn't co-operate.)

Then, I thought it might be fun to check out the popularity of another name my mom considered for me - Lynn.

Mmmmm...neither is very popular now. Perhaps one day both will sound unique as well as antique?

On the same site, I was able to look at the meaning of my name - which I've always been quite happy about.

Both the names Diana and Diane were "derived from the Latin Diviana, which is from divus (divine). The name is borne in Roman mythology by the virgin goddess of the moon and of hunting." - from A World of Baby Names by Teresa Norman. Information accessed at www.babynamewizard.com 25 November 2012.

In classical Greece, however, the goddess Diana was Artemis (I'd have liked that name) and her arts were associated as well with childbirth and women's health. See for instance, the entry for "Artemis" by Ron Leadbetter in the Encyclopedia Mythica.

Now the graphs above don't necessarily reflect the popularity of these names in Canada where I live, so I just had to have a look to see what information there is about names in British Columbia, Canada, my home province.

Here is a chart from the British Columbia, Canada Vital Statistics Agency showing the popularity of variations of Diane in BC from 1912 on. I also included Dinah, which I've seen as a variation.  In BC poor Dinah seems to have been favoured only for a short time - I wonder if that was for the actress, Dinah Shore?

And I compared 'the basic' Diane and Lynn names' popularity in BC as well. Diane seems the winner there, although not very popular now, but if you compare the two names Diane and Diana, in more recent decades Diana as a name has overtaken Diane in popularity in BC, likely due to the influence of the late Princess. 

 One name I'd have liked to have doesn't even appear in the BC list (perhaps there are no examples after 1912), but there is a very modern equivalent shown. I was 'pleased' to see though that the popularity of my other name - the one I don't use and don't want mentioned - has since 1912 declined pretty steadily, then faded to nothing in the 60s!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Clues left, 1888

From The Daily Toronto Gossip, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 14 July 1888, page 1.

All in fun - following the latest Saturday Night Genealogy Fun prompt from Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings.

Newspaper clipping image courtesy of the Newspaper Clipping Generator.

Who To Blame? Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

It's time for Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun over at his blog, Genea-Musings.

Here is this week's SNGF task and the questions we're to answer -

1) Read Brenda Joyce Jerome's post Who or What Do You Blame? on the Western Kentucky Genealogy blog. She asks these questions:

* Can you identify person or event that started you on this search for family information?

* Did you pick up researching where a relative had left off?

* Did your interest stem from your child's school project on genealogy?

So....

I don't think there was any one event or person that started me on my family history research and no, when I started, I knew very few doing genealogy research, certainly no one in my immediate family, although a cousin quickly 'found' me. And my children did no 'family trees' at school, although my grandson did.

Anyway, I wouldn't be blaming anyone, that's for sure. It seems to me that my genealogical interests were a natural outgrowth of my interest in Canadian history, particularly women's and British Columbian and prairie history. After researching historical individuals and families in the census and directories, etc., it was comparatively easy to start looking for my own family.

I can say, however, that my mother was always interested in Canadian and women's history, especially in western Canada, and also, that being a child in school during several centennial celebrations gave my interest in history a early and healthy boost - 1958 British Columbia centennial; 1966 centennial of BC mainland and Vancouver Island colonies merging; 1967 Canada's centennial; 1971 centennial of British Columbia's joining Canada; later there was the 1986 Vancouver BC centennial. (And, my father took me to Mountain View Cemetery regularly too where most of his Vancouver relatives were buried.)

My mother never did any family research, although I know she tried to check out some of her own memories of visits to 1930s Vancouver, but when I started 'doing genealogy' in the late 1980s, she quickly came up with lots of questions she hoped I'd answer (like what ever did happen to Samuel WOOD's first family and to that cousin, James SCOTT, who went to the US...) as well as some topics she might have wished me to forget (like that SCOTT d-i-v-o-r-c-e).

As for the centennial celebrations, I still remember going to City Hall in 1958 to talk to the legendary Vancouver City Archivist, Major James Skitt Matthews, about Vancouver, British Columbia's early history while doing research for a class project at Simon Fraser Elementary.

My parents knew him and Dad was the first to say 'you need to ask the Major, Diane' when I started reading and talking about the 1880s in Vancouver. (My Dad was born in South Vancouver so I thought he should have known all about the city's history. )

The Major was very tall - of course, I was little - and he was both very enthusiastic about Vancouver and very patient with my questions, as I recall, pulling open filing cabinets to show me things - a great introduction to archives research. And he gave me a pamphlet to use - my first citation!

So, thanks Mum, thanks Dad - and special thanks to the Major! Both my historical and genealogical interests have shaped and enriched my life.

City of Vancouver Archives, history: http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/archives/about/history.htm