Three Names, Two Households: What Naming Patterns Can and Cannot Prove

Identifying naming patterns among ancestors and their relatives can be key evidence in proving relationships- but only if the records support it. One of my first research projects was the Royston line. My 2nd great-grandfather, Robert Cisney Royston, had a unique middle name that proved important in tying him to his Alabama and Georgia origins. It also provided the clue that set me on the path that identified the next generation of Roystons.

In this blog post, we’ll look at naming patterns and how I used them as final evidence in my case study, “Naming Patterns and Family Associates Link Thomas Beverly Royston to His Georgia Roots.” After presenting the evidence, I stated the following.

Children’s naming patterns provide additional evidence of common parentage.
Thomas B. Royston and Sarah B. (Royston) Irwin named children with similar, if not
identical, first and middle names. Thomas named children Robert Cisnie, Thomas
B. (presumably Beverly), and Mary Elizabeth Royston. Sarah named children
Robert Cessne, Thomas Beverly, and Mary Elizabeth Irwin. The Roystons may
have chosen these names to honor their mother Mary and their half-siblings, Robert
and Elizabeth Cessna.

Eighteen pages of narrative and 105 footnotes had preceded this paragraph. I used census, land, probate, court, tax, and marriage records along with newspaper articles, gravestones, legislative acts, and a county history in my proof. The naming patterns paragraph was a nice way to add evidence that these siblings knew their family and honored them by naming children after them.

Claude assisted in the writing of this blog post based on my research log and case study.

In 1850, two households sat about a hundred miles apart. One was in Chambers County, Alabama, headed by a farmer the census taker recorded as Thomas B. Royester. The other was in Marietta, Georgia, headed by a judge named David Irwin, with a wife the enumerator listed as Sarah B. Irwin, born in Greene County, Georgia.¹

From the 1830s to the 1860s, each of those households produced a child named Robert Cessne/Cisney, a child named Thomas Beverly, and a daughter named Mary Elizabeth.

That is a striking coincidence. By itself, though, it doesn’t prove anything. What makes it evidence is the analysis and correlation of the records that paint a picture of the two families.

The Pattern

Here are the two sibling sets, side by side, with the record that supplies each name.

Thomas B. Royston’s children	Sarah B. (Royston) Irwin’s children
Robert Cisnie Royston	Robert Cessne Irwin
Thomas B. Royston Jr. (presumably Beverly)	Thomas Beverly Irwin
Mary Elizabeth (Royston) Slagle	Mary Elizabeth Irwin

Three pairs. Two families. Two states.

We may be tempted to stop here and decide this is enough to prove kinship. But four of these six names are among the most common given names in the antebellum South: Robert, Thomas, Mary, and Elizabeth. Both families also had a daughter named Margaret. However, that could be a coincidence, since no ancestor has emerged from the research who could be the namesake.²

Reviewing the Middle Name

What carries the evidentiary weight here is not Robert. It is Cisnie and Cessne.

Both are phonetic renderings of Cessna, a surname — and specifically the surname of the family into which Mary Baker first married. Mary (Baker) Cessna Royston bore three Cessna children by her first husband, Samuel: Robert Baker Cessna, Elizabeth “Betsey” Cessna, and Samuel C. Cessna. She then married John Cary Royston in Greene County in 1803 and bore Thomas and Sarah.³ The Cessna children were their half-siblings.

A surname carried into the next generation as a middle name is a deliberate act. Parents do not accidentally name a child Cessne. The name had to come from somewhere, and it was uncommon enough in Georgia and Alabama that the pool of plausible sources is very small. When two people in different states both do it, the coincidence stops being a coincidence.

The Mary Elizabeth pairing works the same way, though more quietly. Mary was the mother’s name. Elizabeth was the half-sister’s. A daughter named Mary Elizabeth honors both in one stroke, and both women were living within the family’s orbit when those daughters were born.

An additional detail is easy to skim past. Robert Baker Cessna was not a distant memory to Sarah. He was living in her house. The 1850 census records him in the David Irwin household in Marietta, age fifty-two, born in Greene County; he is there again in 1860, age sixty-four.⁴ Sarah named a son after a half-brother who slept under her roof. That is not a faint echo of an old family name. That is a household member.

Seeking All Records

None of the six names above was documented on a birth certificate, a marriage license, or a death certificate. Every one came from a source category where the informant had family knowledge of the middle names.

• A gravestone. R. C. Royston is buried in Parks Cemetery, Stephens County, Oklahoma, and his marker gives only initials.⁵
• A family letter. The expansion of that C to Cisnie survives in a 1966 letter from Effie Lorain Shults Bassett to Bobby Gene Shults — a piece of correspondence written nearly a century after the fact, held privately.⁶
• An estate file. Thomas’s son appears as Thomas B. Royston Jr. in the Chambers County estate papers, where the father’s middle name is also written out as Beverly.⁷
• A newspaper death notice. Sarah’s son’s obituary in the Marietta Journal of 14 January 1916 names him Thomas Beverly Irwin and identifies his father as Hon. David Irwin, deceased.⁸
• More gravestones. R.C. Irwin’s middle name was expanded on his gravestone as Cessne, as was Mary E. Royston’s – to Mary Elizabeth. ⁹

 

Four different record types, none of them civil registration, and three of the four are the kinds of sources that require digging deeper. Middle names in particular tend to survive in exactly these places, because middle names are what families use and what bureaucracies abbreviate. If you want to expand an initial, look where people were writing about each other rather than where clerks were filing forms.

Spelling Variants

Spelling variations occur for many different reasons. A family may not have formalized their surname for several generations. Clerks and census enumerators could spell the names the way they heard them, not necessarily how the family spelled them. Indexers could have misread difficult handwriting. We can note the different variations and use them for comparison and even as ideas for additional searching.

• Royston appears as Royester in the 1850 Alabama census and Roysdon in Louisiana.¹⁰
• Irwin appears as Javin in the 1870 Cobb County census.¹¹
• Cessna appears as Cessnida in 1850, as Cessney and Cisna in Morgan County court and census records, and as Sepna in the printed index to the 1821 land lottery, where a double s was misread as a p.¹²

 

A researcher who searches only for exact spellings finds a fraction of a family. If I had treated Cisnie and Cessne as two different names, I would have missed the pattern entirely. Reconstructing the spoken name behind the written variants is part of the analysis.

Correlating the Evidence

When writing a proof argument, do you start with the naming pattern or end with it? In this case, I chose to present the documentary evidence, then use the naming patterns to support the conclusion of Thomas B. Royston and Sarah B. Royston as siblings.

• In February 1830, Thomas B. Royston served as trustee for Sarah B. Royston, both of Clarke County, in a marriage settlement protecting her property ahead of her marriage to David Irwin. John and Betsy Dawson and Robert Cessna witnessed it.¹³
• In 1831, Thomas paid tax in Morgan County on 202½ acres in Newton County, on the waters of the Yellow River, adjoining land originally granted to M. Cessna.¹⁴
• An 1827 land lottery grant went to “John Royston’s orphan” of Gaines District, Morgan County, and the land later sold by David Irwin in Stewart County carries the same lot and district description.¹⁵
• Mary Cessna, Robert Cessna, John Dawson, Thomas Royston, and the Irwins move together through Greene, Clarke, and Morgan Counties and then to Cass, Cherokee, and Cobb.

That is the case. Tax digests, a marriage settlement, a lottery grant, and a migration cluster. The naming pattern arrives afterward and does something the other evidence cannot quite do on its own: it shows that these people thought of themselves as kin. Land records show proximity and shared interest. A child named Robert Cessne shows sentiment.

Reverse the order and the whole thing becomes unsound. Start from the names, and you are pattern-matching Robert, Mary, and Thomas across a region where those names are everywhere. You could find matches in many families.

Five Tips for Using Naming Patterns

A few practical tips to glean from the Royston case:

1. Build the documentary case first. Naming evidence corroborates. It does not initiate. If the names are your only evidence, you have a hypothesis, not a conclusion.
2. Weight surnames-as-middle-names heavily and common first names not at all. The rarer the name, the more it carries. Cessne is worth a great deal; Margaret not as much.
3. Chase the initials. A middle initial is an unanswered question. Look in estate files, obituaries, family letters, Bible records, and the naming of a junior — that is where expansions live.
4. Record every spelling as written. Cisnie and Cessne only reveal themselves as the same name if you have preserved both exactly as the source gave them.
5. Account for the names that do not fit. Thomas had at least eleven children and Sarah at least seven.¹⁶ Only three pairs match, but the strength of a naming pattern is not how many names line up. It is how unlikely those particular names are to line up by chance, given everything else you already know.

 

Best of luck in all your genealogy research!

 

1. 1850 U.S. census, Chambers Co., Ala., p. 318, dwell./fam. 749, Thomas B Royester household. Also, 1850 U.S. census, Cobb Co., Ga., Marietta Dist., p. 89, dwell./fam. 749, David Irwin household.
2. Chambers Co., Ala., Estates, box 26, folder 24, Thomas Beverly Royston, petition papers of 1868, naming daughter Margarette Royston. Also, 1850 U.S. census, Cobb Co., Ga., David Irwin household, listing Margarett A Irwin, age 14.
3. Greene Co., Ga., Marriage Licenses 1786–1810, p. 10, Royston-Cesna, 6 Jan 1803; FamilySearch, IGN 4849035, image 22. For the Cessna children, see Paul K. Graham, 1805 Georgia Land Lottery Persons Entitled to Draw (Decatur, Ga.: The Genealogy Co., 2005), 97.
4. 1850 U.S. census, Cobb Co., Ga., Marietta Dist., p. 89, dwell./fam. 749, David Irwin household, Robert Cessnida, age 52, born Greene Co. Also, 1860 U.S. census, Cobb Co., Ga., Town Dist., pp. 42–43, dwell. 322, fam. 308, Robert Cessna, age 64, in David Irwin household.
5. Find A Grave, memorial 13395707, image, 19 Feb 2006, by “Debbie,” gravestone for R. C. Royston (Parks Cem., Stephens Co., Okla.).
6. For the middle name of Cisnie, see letter, Effie Lorain Shults Bassett (Sanger, Calif.) to Bobby Gene Shults, 5 May 1966; privately held.
7. Chambers Co., Ala., Estates, box 26, folder 24, Thomas Beverly Royston. Also, Find A Grave, memorial 43662594, Mary Elizabeth (Royston) Slagle, by Bennie Gross.
8. ” Mr. Thomas B. Irwin Crosses Great Divide,” The Marietta (Ga.) Journal, 14 Jan 1916, p. 1, col. 1; Georgia Historic Newspapers.
9. Also, Find A Grave, memorial 74195013, image, 21 Jul 2025, by “MHARDY,” gravestone for Robert Cessne Irwin (Marietta City Cem.); and memorial 89257784, image, 2 Dec 2025, by “MHARDY,” gravestone for Mary Elizabeth Irwin (Marietta City Cem.)
10.  1860 U.S. census, Sabine Parish, La., Western Dist., p. 101 (penned), dwell. 679, Solomon Roysdon.
11. 1870 U.S. census, Cobb Co., Ga., Marietta Dist., p. 274 (penned), dwell./fam. 2053, David Javin household
12.  Ga. Surveyor General, “Index to 1821 Land Lottery of Georgia,” p. 108, Morgan Co., Sepna, Mary (widow); FamilySearch, IGN 8153359, image 170. The double s in Sessna was likely mistranscribed in the typescript as a p. For Cessney, see 1820 U.S. census, Morgan Co., Ga., Capt. Campbell’s Dist., p. 92 (penned), line 6, Robert Cessney.
13. Clarke Co., Ga., Mortgages, L:73, Irwin to Thomas B. and Sarah B. Royston, 1830; FamilySearch, IGN 8560680, image 273. Also, Morgan Co., Marriage record A:153, Irwin-Royston, 1830; FamilySearch, IGN 4848904, image 261.
14. Morgan Co., Ga., 1831 Tax Digest, p. 2, entry for Thomas B. Royston; Morgan County Archives, Madison
15. Stewart Co., Ga., Deed Record B:246, Irwin to Williams, 1832; FamilySearch, IGN 7842207, image 312.
16. Chambers Co., Ala., Estates, box 26, folder 24, Thomas Beverly Royston, petition papers of 1868, naming Sarah Parker, Adeline, Joseph, Robert C., Thomas, Margarette, Richard, Leonidas, Mariah, Martha, and Mary Slaggle. Also, the 1850 U.S. census, Cobb Co., Ga., David Irwin household, listing Marcus S., Margarett A., Julia, Anna M., Robert, David, and Thomas B. Irwin.