Middle names are probably most useful when a child has done something wrong. My grandson knows when he hears the double salvo of “Lincoln Michael!” that he’d better pay attention.
But middle names can also be useful in genealogy, and not just for separating “your” John Quentin Smith from all the other John Smiths. Middle names might reveal family ties.
Positioned between first names and surnames, they could derive from either—or they might simply celebrate some then-popular historical figure. For example, as far as I know my distant 19th-century cousin Zebulon Pike Clough was not related to Zebulon Pike, the explorer namesake of Pike’s Peak.
Zebulon’s parents, however, were relatively early adopters when it comes to middle names. None of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower were recorded as having a middle name. The Virginia Settlers Research Project found that only five colonists out of 33,000 before 1660 had a middle name.
Most of the Founding Fathers didn’t have middle names, either. Only three signers of the Declaration of Independence had three names, and two of those (Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee) were brothers. Even post-independence, only three of
