On Fri, 19 Oct 2012 08:14:11 -0400, "Don Phillipson"
wrote:

wrote in message
...

In uk.rec.gardening R H Draney wrote:
I've come across that several times in my family tree. I think one poor
family had three attempts to get a child called John, before
succeeding. It seems - in these cases - either an attempt to carry on
a family name, or perhaps a tribute to the child that had died. . . .

I can imagine it being rather confusing for /everyone/, unless they
dismissed any reference to the first child from any future conversation!

We can however approach this empirically. When family histories
offer no evidence anyone found this confusing 150 years ago, it is
fair to say there was probably no such confusion.

As the majority of people would have been illiterate the form in which
names appeared in writing would have been irrelevant. In speech there
would have been ways of making clear who was being spoken about if it
was not obvious in context. Those colloquial forms would probably not
have made it into written records.

--
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)