Re: Records of 1822 to 1855 for Purification church
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In reply to:
Re: Records of 1822 to 1855 for Purification church
CAROLYN NIESSNER 10/09/09
Dear Carolyn,
Lewis Beaman was still alive on the 1830 census according to the genealogy I found.James was born in 1823.Babies tended to be born about every 2 years back then, so there could be 3 more children of Susannah and Lewis in addition to the ones listed in that genealogy before 1830.Susannah was still alive in 1850 according to the census.One of the missing babies could have been John Louis.
Every Catholic family has some baptism stories about its members.(We should write a book about them.)My aunt and uncle wanted to name their son Jeffrey, but the priest insisted it had to be Geoffrey, because he thought Jeffrey wasn't a saint's name.
The rule was that the name had to be a saint's name.That's probably why the certificate says Louis instead of Lewis.We have several saints named Louis, and I don't know of any named Lewis.
If someone was insistent that they wanted to name a baby a non-saint's name, I think they just added an additional name that was a saint's name.
Families usually understood the Church rules, and a baby would have its baptismal name, and the family would call it by whatever nickname they chose.The baptismal name would be used only on legal documents.I had a friend, who is deceased, whose mother was unable to go out to his baptism.An aunt took him to be baptized.She forgot the name the mother had said, so the priest named the baby Michael John, because he'd always wanted to baptize a baby with his own name.My friend was called Jack all of his life, and wasn't told about his real name until he went to join a religious order.
Baptisms are supposed to be done as soon as possible after birth.In early Georgia, there would be several baptisms and marriages every time the priest traveled through, unless a place was big enough to have a resident priest, who could baptize the babies as they were born.The family who donated the land for Locust Grove's Catholic Cemetery also donated land for a priest's residence.Check the signature on the Baptism certificate and see if the priest was in residence at Locust Grove or Sharon.If he was, the date of the baptism should be close to Lewis' birth.If it's off a year or two, it might be another child.
My brother's middle name is Joseph.It was an attempt to name him after his father's middle name, because no one in the family liked his father's first name.But no one wanted to have him called Joe, either, so Joseph was his middle name, and we never used it.So people sometimes feel obliged to name a child after a grandfather and give it the grandfather's first name but call the child by the middle name, which they like better.My uncle, my ophthalmologist, and my dentist fall into that category.
You might want to look up Irish naming customs.The early Irish here had them.Here is an Irish genealogy site.http://www.rootsweb.com/~fianna/http://www.rootsweb.com/~fianna/
Sincerely,
Kate Hagel