Sofia Kotilainen

The genealogy of personal names: towards a more productive method in historical onomastics.

It is essential to combine genealogical and collective biographical approaches with network analysis if one wants to take full advantage of the evidence provided by (hereditary) personal names in historical and linguistic onomastic research. The naming practices of rural families and clans from the 18th to the 20th century can bring us much fresh information about their enduring attitudes and values, as well as about other mentalities of everyday life. Personal names were cultural symbols that contained socially shared meanings. With the help of genealogical method it is possible to obtain a more nuanced understanding of these past naming practices, for example by comparing the conventions of different communities. A long-term and systematic empirical research also enables us to dispute certain earlier assumptions that have been taken for granted in historical onomastics. Therefore, the genealogical method is crucial in studying the criteria for the choices of personal names in the past.

Rural people’s literacy skills in the remembrance of the departed: the writing of personal names on sepulchral monuments at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Abstract At the end of the nineteenth century, more and more sepulchral monuments made of a durable material began to be erected in Finnish rural graveyards. The personal names inscribed on the monuments together with the dates of the deceased, epithets indicating their social status and biblical quotations were intended to reflect in written form the lives of the departed and remind those who come after them about the lives of the ancestors. I use a collective biographical method and databases to examine how sepulchral monuments represented the dead persons’ identities and life stories. I concentrate especially on the personal names inscribed on the monuments and analyse how they can be used as a source for ascertaining the nomenclature of the time and changes in ways that personal names were written. I consider in particular the role of improved literacy skills of the common people in this change. They were an important factor behind the creation of visible monuments and preserving the collective memory of the deceased person.