The Legal Genealogist blogged this week about the use of middle names among early Americans. Did you know it was not a common practice until just recently? "Recently" being the 1840s. (I've a different view of time than most people) Read Judy G. Russell's excellent blog post here:
http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog/2015/08/24/stop-middling-along/
Russell writes:
"The reality is that middle names were rare in America before the 19th century. As Robert W. Baird reports in “The Use of Middle Names”:
Prior to 1660, the Virginia Settlers Research Project found “only 5 persons out of over 33,000 had genuine middle names.” Not one person born by 1715 in St Peter’s parish of New Kent County sported a middle name. Surry County’s records, which are unusually complete for the latter part of the 17th century, record only one person who used a middle name. Other studies of public records confirm that seventeenth-century parents gave their children more than one name so rarely that the practice was essentially nonexistent.
Middle names began to find favor among wealthy extended families in the late 1700s. Aristocratic families increasingly began giving their children two names, so that by the time of the Revolution a quite small but detectable proportion of southerners carried middle names, mainly those from upper class families. A study of the births and baptisms recorded in the register of Virginia’s Albemarle Parish shows that about 3% of children born between 1750 and 1775 were given middle names.
… The practice did not really catch on with the middle class until after the turn of the century, and became increasingly common within a generation or two. Although only a small percentage of children born around 1800 were given a middle name, it had become nearly customary by the time of the Civil War. By 1900 nearly every child born had a middle name."