"Peter Duncanson [BrE]" wrote in message
...

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.

We can do better (more empirically) than this. British censuses record
everyone's name from 1841 onwards, and the population was mostly
literate even before attendance at schools (state-funded since 1871)
became compulsory. Even before these Victorian reforms, the church
of England was punctilious about recording births, marriages and deaths.

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)