The mnemonic value of naming children after earlier relatives will be lost to future generations of researchers

Today we name our kids after celebrities or picked from lists of currently popular baby names, lists readily found on the internet.

Middle names, let alone multiple middle names, are out of fashion.

I had a major, major, puzzle-solving revelation yesterday, when I finally saw the full name of the father of GW the Portapique spree killer.

GW’s grandparents were of the WWI generation, when the tradition was strong that it was very, very important to keep the memories of old dead relatives alive,  ‘orally’, in the names of  brand new babies.

MNEMONICS they are called : memory aides. My eight year old granddaughter just loves this naughty example to help her in math :

It suddenly seemed highly probable that GW’s father was named after his dead aunt who had died as a child, as well as after his father in his middle name.

This was because both of his names were uniquely rare in my now fully-overstocked mental database of all New Brunswick Wortman first names : but they were both found in  just one family, a family I had suspected but could not prove was that of GW’s grandparents.

I abandoned my other searches and dug in deep...real deep.

And I was right : I’ve located all of GW’s relatives, all interconnected via obituaries and government documents, photos and everything.

The collective GW Wortman family had done its best to hide its connections to the Portapique killer  —— for reasons highly relevant as to why GW ended up the mass killer that he did, which was why I was doing this research in the first place  —— but genealogical  clues undid them.

But in the future, families will be much harder to track....