1830s Favourite Boys Names in St Mary Bourne

There are 28 different first names recorded for boys in the baptism records for St Peter’s Church in the 1830s. The top three are:

1. Charles (28)
2. John (26)
3. William (21)

There are definitely two names in this list that I did not expect to see and they are Marshall and Benson, these both seem rather modern and unusual for the time period.

Looking at the “Dictionary of First Names”¹, Benson is not mentioned at all. Marshall is described as an English surname that has been used occasionally as a masculine name since the 19th century, this is clearly on of those times.

1. Pickering, D. (2004). Dictionary of First Names. London: Penguin Books Ltd. ↩︎