08 October 2014

No Junior Here

Some families use "senior" and "junior" to distinguish between older and younger individuals with the same name. Don't assume that the "senior" is the father of "junior." Don't assume either that just because a father and a son had the same name that they had to use "senior" and "junior" to distinguish between them. Some families didn't.

3 comments:

  1. An ancestor family from Norway had two sons. Both were named Henrik - one for the maternal grandfather and one for the paternal grandfather. The older was known as Henrik Senior, and the younger was known as Henrik Junior.

    They must have tired of explaining their relationship. After coming to America, they took different surnames.

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  2. I found a relative that used 'Junior" and they presumed the father was "Senior". I think Junior was just a nickname as I found the father actually had a different middle name. Thus the error in the family published genealogy.

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  3. My brother's name ends in Jr., but his given name is not the same as our father's. That could be really confusing. Also, during the Civil War, two distant relatives with the same name were designated Sr and Jr - Sr being the older of the two and Jr being the younger. No further relationship existed for these two.

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