Week 26: Middle (names). Way too much material!

One of the suggested themes for this one was the use of middle names instead of first names.  Middle names are definitely a thing on both sides of my family:  people who use them for given names, people who have unusual and enigmatic middle names, people who don't have a middle name at all, and people like me who use both their first and middle names in everyday conversation.

First, those who use their middle names as their given names.  The first one I was aware of as a child was my grandfather, (George) Claud Prewitt.  I suspect that there were other George Prewitts around and that his how he ended up using his middle name, otherwise it is a mystery:  why would anyone choose to use "Claud" when "George" was available to him?  Grandpa was born in about 1885 which means that the best record of the people around him, the 1890 census, is gone (destroyed by fire).

Dad had a Prewitt cousin, known to me as cousin Bob, who was also using his middle name.  Joseph Robert Prewitt was only known by his middle name.  Moreover, his mother, who married into the Prewitts, was also known only by her middle name, (Ellen) Irene.  My father always referred to her as Aunt Reney, and she remarried after her Prewitt husband passed, so it led me on quite a merry chase to find out who she really was.   I had met her once, when I was a teenager and was understandably confused by the whole situation (particularly as there was a cute boy about my age who was a fourth cousin or thereabouts which may have interfered with my attention).

This tendency to the use of middle names was not limited to my father's side.  My great-great-grandmother, Ida Caroline Dunker, was known as "Carrie."  I can't say that I blame her for preferring Carrie.  My uncle Ralph Chilcoat, who married my mother's sister, was actually John Ralph.  

As to the rest of us, well, my own name uses my middle name as part of a first name: Lee Ann.  My mother didn't have a middle name which caused endless problems when she applied for a passport, my father's middle name was Hartred and I have yet to run into any other Hartreds on the family tree, my sister got both of our parents' names and became Cecilia Ruth.  There are some ugly middle names (Ethel, Gertrude).  My husband's family has been more conventional, using middle names either to honor previous generations (Edith Margaret, my mother-in-law, was named for her own mother Margaret) or to distinguish them from previous generations (my father-in-law was Eugene Walter Doerflinger, and his oldest son was Eugene Robert).  My children were given middle names that could be spelled either with initial C or K (though we only used the K once, to my regret).

This was definitely a more fruitful topic than I expected!