New Post
Search
Help[Facts] Re: My column on Jude
in reply to a message by clevelandkentevans
That's so interesting about St Jude and being the patron saint of lost causes. I must admit I always thought "Hey, Jude" was about a woman, especially because of the end where he sings "Judy, Judy, Judy". It's probably because I was unfamiliar with the name Jude but knew lots of Judiths and Judys. The 1860 US census appears to show almost as many women named Jude as men, and also a good number of women named Juda and Judah. Judith was in use at the time so was there a similar confusion and possible nickname formation then too?
This message was edited 1/3/2025, 7:04 PM
2
Replies
I am not surprised that Juda and Judah would occasionally turn up as female names in the 19th century as short forms or alterations of Judith.
I do wonder, though, if early examples of women listed as "Jude" were being pronounced as one syllable or if that is just a spelling someone used for "Judy." Remember that census takers back then got the job as a political plum and were NOT chosen because they either hand good handwriting or good spelling. I have even seen many instances of census takers getting the sex of the person wrong, so they were often careless. And I have found that one really can't accept the data found from a search of the index to the census on a site like Ancestry.com without looking at the photocopy of the actual census records. The indexers themselves often looked at a census taker's handwriting from over a century ago and assimilated what they saw to a modern name they were familiar with, when if you look closely at the handwriting and pay attention to how other names on the page are written, one will often see that was not really what the census taker wrote down. I myself had a great-aunt whose full first and middle names were Alexandria Tennant (after a man named Alexander Tennant). She was often called Tennant in the family, and in one of the censuses she is in the indexer had her name as "Toussaint", as that's what he or she thought the bad handwriting of "Tennant" looked like.
I do wonder, though, if early examples of women listed as "Jude" were being pronounced as one syllable or if that is just a spelling someone used for "Judy." Remember that census takers back then got the job as a political plum and were NOT chosen because they either hand good handwriting or good spelling. I have even seen many instances of census takers getting the sex of the person wrong, so they were often careless. And I have found that one really can't accept the data found from a search of the index to the census on a site like Ancestry.com without looking at the photocopy of the actual census records. The indexers themselves often looked at a census taker's handwriting from over a century ago and assimilated what they saw to a modern name they were familiar with, when if you look closely at the handwriting and pay attention to how other names on the page are written, one will often see that was not really what the census taker wrote down. I myself had a great-aunt whose full first and middle names were Alexandria Tennant (after a man named Alexander Tennant). She was often called Tennant in the family, and in one of the censuses she is in the indexer had her name as "Toussaint", as that's what he or she thought the bad handwriting of "Tennant" looked like.
3
The marriage records from the 1850 decade had similar ratios of female and male Jude and Judah. I noticed the majority of the female Judes were from Pennsylvania. Was there an influence from the German or Dutch speaking populations? The female Judahs were more common in Kentucky/Tennessee/North Carolina where the male Judah followed Jude in being more popular in the North.
2