Twins

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Nathalie Connor said: On the bright side, they don't sound alike so they knew who was who when mom called them to dinner. I have cousins Dale and Gail who always had to ask which one was being summoned!

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Nathalie Connor said: Paul this is an aside. I am fascinated the derivation of surnames and I wonder if your Thirkettles 'downsized' to Kettle.

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Paul said: Interesting that you raise that, Nathalie. Although the most common spelling of the surname is THIRKETTLE, the shortened version is generally found at KITTLE. My ancestors with this name came from the county of Norfolk. The registers of Horsham St Faith in that county record the name as both Thirkettle and Kittle (as well as variants) at the same period of time. So, although my ancestor was baptised as Margaret Thirkettle, she is shown as Margaret Kittle in the entry for her marriage.

The issue caused me a lot of confusion, as I encountered it in my early days of research and first came across Margaret in a search for her husband, so knew her only as Margaret Kittle for some time.

Name variants can often be puzzling and throw you off track. Norfolk (probably because of the strong accents of its inhabitants!) causes particular problems. My HARROD relatives / ancestors are even to be found on the same page in a parish register or in the same document (a will) with the name spelled differently. They can be Harrod, Herod, Harwood, etc., so I never know how to properly record the spellings over the generations, or the "original" spelling. One ancestor was baptised as (Stephen) Herod, buried as Harrod, but known as Harwood for much of the time in between!

Back to Thirketttle - there are so many variants of the surname to be found. I wonder, do you have any personal interest in this or the Kittle / Kettle surname?

LegacyUser

Juli said: Reaney & Wilson, Dictionary of English Surnames, s.n. Kettle: "Old Norse Ketill '(sacrificial) cauldron', anglicized as Cytel, from which comes Kittel."
s.n. Thurkell: "Old Norse Þorkell, Old Danish Thorkil, a contracted form of Old Norse Þorketill, very common in England and often used in Normandy. v. Thurkettle."
s.n. Thurkettle: "Anglo-Scandinavian Þurcytel, from Old Norse Þorketill 'Thor's (sacrificial) cauldron'. Less common than the shortened Þorkell v. Thurkell."

(In case it's not clear from the derivations, the Norse "cauldron" names are personal names. The examples/citations include things like Turketel in the Domesday Book and Johannes filius Turketilli in a 1214 Curia Regis roll.)

Thurkell often turned into Turtle by the 16th century.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Heh. If mom got the names straight when she called them. My wife's mom would go through all the kids' names until she hit the right one... especially if she was angry. (sputter, sputter and one child thought his name was an expletive...)

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Tom Huber said: My Baptismal (not Christening) certificate shows the names of my godparents. I don't think there are any FS record sets of the certificates for baptisms that were issued when I was a kid.

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Tom Huber said: Talk about going down a different path, but a fascinating one, never-the-less.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Juli, getting back to your comment about the dagger. Is there any current use for the whatever it is called ‡ ?

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Juli said: The only use of the double dagger I'm aware of is as a footnote symbol (in the style that uses a succession of symbols [*, †, ‡] instead of numbers), but its close resemblance to the genealogical "died" symbol might make it problematical.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Thanks for the response. In looking at your response about the succession of symbols for footnotes, the double dagger is something that symbolically (in my thinking) represents more than one. That is, one cross line for one person and two for more than one person.

Just a thought that struck my in the wee hours of the morning.

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Carolyn Wheeler said: I really like this idea!!!

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Carolyn Wheeler said: What if you turned the double dagger on its side? Then maybe it wouldn’t look so much like the death symbol? - although it would take up two character spaces instead of one.

I do agree with Juli that the dagger symbol (or even a single cross (+) symbol is already taken as a death symbol, but if the double cross were turned on its side maybe it would smack of two person-symbols holding hands? Oh well, it’s a thought.

LegacyUser

Juli said: (This is Juli's sister stealing her account for a sec) The astronomical symbol for Gemini is kind of like a Roman numeral II, but with the top and bottom lines curved inward:
https://emojipedia.org/gemini/
The downside is that it's not exactly easy to type.

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Tom Huber said: It may not be easy to type, Juli's sister, but none of the symbols, such as the camera symbol, can be typed. This is something that FS could support, just like they do the camera icon and its variants.

Oh, and thanks for the link to the emojis.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Nathalie - just to indicate the perils of sticking things in and around a name, the UK has a singer & actress (I'm quoting Wikipedia here) who is actually named Sally Ann Triplett. I just checked in Ancestry, and it is her real name.

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Paul said: Nathalie

Still trying to improve / add consistency to the graphics, but pleased you brought up the subject, as I intend to apply similar "portraits" to all "my twins" as I come across them again. However, as illustrated, can be a little confusing where there are two sets of twins in the same family.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: My wife's grandmother had three sets of twins. I haven't seen that on my side of our family, though they have occurred in my ancestral lines, just not multiple sets.

ErikaEldred

In the FamilySearch platform, we think of a twin upon seeing the date of birth...Maybe we could have a clickable option in the date of birth information? Not only twins but triplets and other quantities of siblings. I also want to through out the option of Identical or even conjoined.