Your name is the first document anyone ever filed about you, and almost nobody remembers who wrote it.

Names Across Generations is a cultural history of how people have named each other, from villages that needed to tell three Johns apart to modern registries that decide what a name may look like. It follows surnames, given names, faith, migration, paperwork, and law across centuries and continents, and it shows why one family names a child after the dead while another avoids it.

This is not a directory of name meanings. It takes on the stories families love to repeat, such as the clerk who supposedly changed an ancestor's name on arrival or the crest that supposedly belongs to a surname, and weighs them against the documented record. The true stories turn out to be stranger and more human.

You'll learn how to read a surname without falling for folk etymology, how to search old records when spellings refuse to behave, and how to choose, keep, or reclaim a name with a clear view of its history.

Written for curious readers, family historians, writers, teachers, and anyone who has ever had to spell their name for a stranger, this book treats naming as a living record of how people lived and moved. Start reading and look at your own name differently.

Names Across Generations - The Cultural History of Personal Naming

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