How did the tradition of middle names start? What are naming traditions in othe

Question:

How did the tradition of middle names start? What are naming traditions in other lands?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Some of the answers are close. The actual answer is that there were two different ways that they developed and it depends on which country you're talking about in getting the answer.

In countries that used to use the "patrynomic" system of identifying people it was hard to break the habit of using the father's name in identifying the child. So the patrynome was added to the first name and continued on as an extension of the first name after surnames were in place. That's why you can research a Dutchman and find records of Hans Jacob van Mullekom from Noord Brabant and know that Hans was the son of Jacob and it was an easy way to keep records straight. It's also why so many Frenchmen have hyphenated first names AND a middle name...more on that next.

The second way they developed was in Catholic families. The tradition was to give the child a patron saint at his/her baptism and registering the child by their first name and their patron saint's name. That gives us "Jean-Luc" and "Marie-Genevieve" in French speaking countries...only "Jean" and "Marie" were their patron saints and "Luc" and "Genevieve" were their "common names". In religious records they were still known by their patron saints' names first and their common names second. In civil records they dropped their patron saints' names and just used their common names.

In other Catholic countries the order was reversed. That's why we have Spaniards with several middle names...they were given several patron saints. And it's why Italians dropped the hyphenation altogether for a few centuries and just "smushed" the names together, such as Michaelangelo. Over time the Church standardized the naming traditions so priests were the ones who actually separated the two names and gave some consistency from one country to another. Prior to the Reformation, Europe was predominantly Roman Catholic. We Orthodox were in the East. So the tradition was standardized in the West, but the Orthodox did not share the tradition in Greece, the Balkans, Asia, etc. Hence, middle names are an outgrowth of Catholicism and the standardization of old practices into one new one.