A Fun Fact from the Record
Five centuries of a family, and a surprisingly short list of names. Here's which ones repeat the most — and how a few of them traveled down the generations to honor someone.
A family reaches back twenty-two generations — and still, one name in every eighteen people is a Mary.
Across the direct ancestors and their kin in the register. Counted by first name.
A classic English-Southern naming pool — a handful of names, reused every generation. (Count Marys hiding in middle names, like Mary Polly and Mary Baker, and there are even more.)
The fun part isn't that names repeat — it's why. These are the ones the record actually explains.
Mary Baker DeGraffenreid was "christened Mary Baker for the grandmother she never knew" — Mary Baker of Chowan, the Carolina colonel's daughter. The grandmother's own surname had already become a boy's first name a generation earlier: Baker DeGraffenreid, born 1744.
Freeman's middle name isn't decoration — it's his mother's family. Aaron Searcy married Martha "Patsy" Jones in 1819, and their son carried the Jones name forward, the maternal line folded into a first-and-middle.
The Englishwoman who crossed the Atlantic in 1714 and the man who waited for her on the Charleston dock. Both names echo down the centuries — five Barbaras in the record, right down to a great-aunt the family still calls Aunt Bob.
The name was reused so faithfully that untangling which Aaron fathered Freeman took a Revolutionary War pension file to settle. That's a story of its own →
The family's favorite way to honor a line was to carry its surname forward as a first or middle name — so a maiden name never quite disappears. You can watch it happen right in the register:
The counts come straight from the Reader's Register (224 documented people). Where a name is marked documented, the record actually says who it honored; the common names — the Marys and Johns and Williams — are the family's shared naming pool, and we don't claim a specific namesake for each one.