The naming practice is just as confusing to me when I am in the Azores among the living as it is in searching documents. I have neighbors I know are related to each other with different family names. Some children use the father's family name, others use the mother's.
One factor, I've learned, is the repetition of the same handful of given names. Most women have Maria as their first given name, which means most women have the same name. How do you distinguish one from the other? Some use a combination of first and second names as in "Maria Santo Christo" or "Maria da Paz." Some go entirely by the second name. Many women named "Maria Conceição" go only by Conceição. One family here of four sisters is an example. Each one is Maria, though only the first one uses that name (Maria da Gloria), the next two (twins) use only their second names, and the fourth one goes back and forth between Maria Margarida and just Margarida. In her case two different people talking about her to me might use different names to refer to her. As for a family name, that can depend upon whose land the family now lives on. All four of these sisters use their family name, not their husbands' names, primarily because their family has been a prominent one for a few generations. In the case of my family in Faial, my grandfather's youngest sister remained in the house to care for their mother and she remained in the house after their mother died. Her last name was Leal, same as everyone else in the family. She married "the boy next door" whose family name was Coelho; however, she deemed "rabbit" an inappropriate name for a woman, so she never changed her last name. In turn, both her sons used the name Coelho, but she used Leal with her daughter, which she still does, long after her marriage to Abreu (another boy next door). Maintaining the Leal name ties her with the property and signals everyone how the property has passed from generation to generation. Another complication is the repetition of the male names José, Manuel, Jõao, António, or Carlos. The oldest son quite often gets the same first name as his father. I have a neighbor, Manuel Paulino, whose adult son is also Manuel. So the two could be told apart, the son uses his mother's family name: Manuel Furtado. This is what everyone calls him. In turn, his daughters use Paulino as their family name. Thus, their birth certificates probably show their parents' last names as different from their own. In the nearby town of Santo Amaro, most men and many women use two names: António Carlos, José Manuel, Maria de Jesus, Mary Jõao, and so on. Many of my neighbors do not even know each other's last name!!!! Reason: Many of the 294 permanent residents have one of three dominant family names: Morais, Neves, or Melo. Some have TWO of those names in their "full" names. Here in my fourth summer, I am still trying to get the names straight, and I frequently have to look at my notes to see who is who. It took me two summers to determine whether it's António Carlos or Carlos António I call for delivery of the gas cannisters. And then I had to spend another summer getting straight whether I was to call António Carlos Melo Neves or António Carlos Neves Melo! Finally, I have it right. Really, getting the names straight among the living is difficult enough; searching through old records seems nearly impossible. But as many of us have found out, the results are worth the effort! Tomás Leal -- For options, such as changing to List, Digest, Abridged, or No Mail (vacation) mode, log into your Google account and visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Azores. Click in the blue area on the right that says "Join this group" and it will take you to "Edit my membership." --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Azores Genealogy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to azores+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to azores@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/azores.
