What does abbreviation J.D. mean in place of first name on U.S. 1870 census?
I've encountered a census record that has the abbreviation J.D. in place of a first name for an infant child. Does anyone know what this means? See line 28 here: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HT-6X5Z-8V?i=22&cc=1438024&personaUrl=%2Fark%3A%2F61903%2F1%3A1%3AMN6J-7TF
I'm fairly confident the person in question is actually Esteban/Stephen Norvert Lopez, so J.D. wouldn't make sense as initials. Furthermore, the same abbreviation is used on line 8 of the same page, and I've found it used by the same recorder, Jonathan D. Dunlap(?), on other pages, always for infants.
Stephen Lopez's page: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/94N6-4LL
Record of an Esteban being born to Geronimo and Catalina Lopez in July 1870. I'm trying to confirm this is the same person as Stephen: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QSQ-G9ZP-Q53S?cat=321399
Best Answer
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I searched the index of the film for given name = JD (exact) and filtered the list to Los Angeles, and I cannot find anything that these 14 JDs have in common except for being the youngest in the family. Most of them are younger than a year old, but two have a "1" in the age column and no month of birth ("JD" Lopez, image 23 line 8, and "JD" Scott, image 27 line 18).
The "just putting his initials" theory has some merit. The instructions indicate that column 3 (the name) is required: "There are certain columns on each schedule which must be filled in every case, or the work of enumeration has not been performed. Such are: 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, on Schedule 1, ..." Perhaps Mr. Dunlap had a habit of forgetting to ask for the baby's name, and made up for it by filling in his initials on those lines, so that it looked like he'd done his job in full?
It'd be a more solid theory if the letters resembled the way he wrote his full name, but he used a much more ornate D there (at the top of every page). (The letter in the abbreviation is identical to the letter he uses in names like Dolores and Domingo, though, so it is definitely a D, just a different one than what he uses in his own name/signature.)
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No idea about JD, but Esteban is Spanish for Stephen, and you'll notice that the birth record is in Spanish, so it uses Spanish forms of names. (This used to be so universal and taken for granted that nobody even noticed: names were translated into the language of the record.)
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Yes, thank you. I'm familiar with Spanish, so I suspect Stephen and Esteban are the same person, but due to discrepancies in dates, I'm trying to confirm. The J.D. on the census is one part of the puzzle.
This same family previously reused the name Maria Ygnacia for a daughter when her older sister by the same name died very young, so I'm wary of making an assumption regarding Stephen and Esteban.
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It was very common to reuse the name if a child died. In the England and the US, you used to have to pay for the names.
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I think "paying for the name" is an urban legend, invented to explain the practice of re-using names of children who died, but never actually documented anywhere. A more plausible explanation I've heard is that by re-using the name, they felt like the child lived on: it was a practical way of dealing with their grief.
I have been unable to turn up anything about that pesky "JD". I wondered if it was actually "ID" for "infant daughter", but both of the examples on that page are male, and the one capital i that I found (in Ignacio on line 30) looks slightly different than the J. So it's definitely JD, and it's equally definitely not being used in its most common capacity (Juris Doctor: doctor of law). This enumerator appears to use it for children under one year of age -- but not consistently: there are two infants on image 26 with names, for example.
There is no mention of treating the names of infants any differently than adults in the enumerator's instructions (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/technical-documentation/questionnaires/1870/1870-instructions.html), so no help there.
I'll keep looking, but so far, I've got nothing.
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Looking at that line alone, I read it as "I.U.", which (in view of the age of the child) I would have taken to mean "Infant Unnamed". Probably just a desperate attempt to give it at least some interpretation, however, as Julia makes more sensible suggestions, based on other entries!
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Sounds like you've gone down the same rabbit holes I did in my research, lol. Frustrating, isn't it? I had wondered if maybe it was I.D. for Infant Deceased, possibly for infants who were unnamed? But according to the census instructions, they only should have been recorded in that case if they were living on June 1st.
Yes, I had toyed with the idea that they are different letters as well, particularly the second one. Perhaps a U or a V? But the first letter does seem to match the numerous Js on the page better than the I's, and the second letter definitely looks like the Ds on lines 30 and 32 to me.
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This might be crazy but hear me out: the enumerator who (apparently exclusively) used J.D. so extensively is named Jonathan D. Dunlap. Could he have been just signing his initials to indicate an unnamed person?
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I'm with Julia - urban legend about paying for the name.
It was very common to reuse names of deceased infants in order to honor the parent or grandparent for whom the child had been named. It's even a standing joke in our family where my Uncle Paul and Aunt Jane named their two children Paul and Jane. My cousin Paul used to make his mother a bit crazy by telling that tall tale that they were too poor to afford another name.
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I did the same and searched other films of the same census. Few JD's turned up compared to Mr. Dunlap's sheets, and when they did, it looked like the enumerator used initials in place of names frequently (not JD specifically).
I noticed the same ornate D when he wrote his own name. I think we could explain that away as a signature. My signature looks different than the way I normally write the letters in my name, and certainly Mr. Dunlap would prefer speed to fancy letters in the process of enumeration. So I think I'm satisfied with the initials explanation. Thanks for helping me dig!
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