I have a daughter who says she has wished that her name had been something different from what it is. Funny, I have never asked her why. However, one day when she was looking at some of my genealogy notes she discovered another Sanderson with the same given name. That made hers more palatable, I guess, because the subject has not come up again.
That started me thinking about my family. My Dad's sister was given a name on her birth certificate that she did not like. Actually, to me, it was a nickname. She did something about it in that she had her name changed legally by the court. My dad and his brother reversed their first and second names so that the names they were called were their first given name. It seemed to carry down to me as my parents and everyone else called me by my middle name. I happened to like both given names so it didn't bother me. However, if I had not been on my toes my high school diploma would have reversed them. To me they would have sounded awkward that way.
My husband told me once that when we moved away from where I grew up, he was going to start calling me by my first given name. When that really happened, I had to look to see to whom he was talking to or about the first couple of times. I soon became used to it but when I think about it both names were ones that I liked. When we went home, people still called me by my middle name. I answer to both.
My mother's dad was one of those people. At birth, he was given the name Horace for his dad. Something happened and he did not like it so it was changed (not by the courts just by him) to Wilfred. He was in the Civil War...I knew that as my grandmother received a widows pension. I wanted to know more of his war service than just that he was in it on the side of the Union. The indices that I looked in for him never gave his name. I mentioned that to a cousin one day and she told me it was because he had enlisted under an alias. I asked her if she knew what it was and she told me that he used Henry C. He never changed his surname. Using the alias I found him in the index for the "Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Civil War." When I used the alias to get his pension records, I found the card that led to them, but because of other things they were not where anyone expected them to be. I finally got them.
In going through his records, I found letters from family and friends who wrote to vouch that Wilfred was indeed Henry C. One friend gave a reason as to why he had used an alias. It was not because he was under age but because he did not want his father or older brother getting the bounty that these enlistees got for having joined.
Later, in looking at the town vital records, I found that when he went to report the birth of each of his sixteen children he used both Wilfred and Henry C and variations of them. Had I not had the knowledge of this change I would have thought he was someone else.
Therefore, when you lose an ancestor and cannot discover any other reason for their being missing, you may want to consider a different given name that could be similar to the one for which you aresearching.
