What's in a name (genealogically speaking)?

You might think that identifying your ancestors would be fairly straightforward. When I started working on genealogy, I certainly thought so. I figured that I should be able to put together a neat list of couples who gave birth to children, who later met each other, married, then gave birth to other children, who would then meet other ancestors, and so on. At one end of the list should be Adam and Eve, with a family tree that became vastly simplified with Noah, and at the other end would be my family. I've learned that it's just not that simple, and there are numerous reasons why, chief among them are: name changes, poor record keeping, deceit, and mistakes.

By "name changes", I mean more than someone who legally changes their name, it also refers to the problem of changing forms of names. Think back to my imagined list of ancestors. It would start with Adam and Eve. But, neither Adam nor Eve had last names. In fact, last names are a fairly recent way to identify people, and they are not used world-wide. Since I believe that my primary family lines came from Europe, I have to face the fact that last names were not commonly used there until about one-thousand years ago. Before that, they just weren't needed. Had my family come from China I would find some surnames in use back about 2300 B.C. If our family originated in Tibet, they still would be known only by a first name.

The average person in Europe in the late 900's had relatively restricted interactions with other people. In fact, the number of people they knew was so restricted that a man they knew as William, was probably the only William they knew. If there were two, they might identify one of them by location, such as "William of the Forest", or by his parents, as in "William, son of Robin". You can see how over time names such as these would become William Forest, or William Robinson.

Next time: More examples of name changes, more problems for genealogical research.