[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] First name Reginald

[Sigrid Pohl Perry]

Eduardo,

Gary's information that the name Reginald is related to both Reynald and 
Reinhold provides you with a possible answer. I have been working with 
the Lublin Project to index records from that parish church. The birth 
index shows 210 babies born with that given name; the MPD shows 1310 
births. Many of these people also traveled on to Volhynia. I even have a 
living first cousin born there whose name is Reinhold and he has a 
cousin with the same name. Records for Poland and Volhynia were often 
written in Russian. The Cyrillic alphabet has no separate letter for g 
and h, so that letter is open to interpretation by other readers. Most 
documents showed German names with a phonetic Russian spelling. Later, 
someone had to interpret that back to German (or English or Spanish). 
So, a name that looked like "Rengold" in Russian could easily be turned 
into the more familiar "Reginald" to someone from another country. You 
would have to try to trace which documents held various spellings of the 
name.

You asked if the name could indicate origin. You could do a search in 
the MPD, using just the given name, and see if there is a pattern for 
where the earliest known records come from. But that would still be a guess.

Regards,
Sigrid Pohl Perry
Pohl, Domres, Hapke, Wolski, Buettner/Bittner, Gatzke, Mantei, Kuehn, etc.

On 3/22/2012 11:55 AM, Gary Warner wrote:
> Gunther,
>
> I guess Eduardo will have to say why he asked.   I thought he was asking
> if Reginald was really a German name.   It appears that in the form
> Reginald that it is not, but when family names get written down by
> descendants years later, they sometimes translate a name into one they
> are familiar with.   If that is the case, I cannot explain why Reginald
> was chosen for the change in South America, since I have always taken
> Reginald to be an English name.
>
> Gary
>
> On 3/22/2012 9:33 AM, Günther Böhm wrote:
>    
>> Am 22.03.2012 13:33, schrieb Eduardo Kommers:
>>      
>>> I would like to know your opinion about the possible origin of the first
>>> name Reginald ? (Reginald Hubert born 1829 - son of Jacob and Johanna
>>> Hubert)
>>>        
>> Sorry Gary,
>> I imagined that Eduardo asked for the actual reason to choose this given name.
>> We should consider that in 1829 as much as no one knew the linguistic [i.e. germanic] origin of a given name. The
>> motivations were either religious or dynastic which depended on the actual authority of the local priest and landlord.
>> In some cases it was familial (name of grandfather, father or godfather). Admittedly, Reginald was an old high German
>> name, but it was transported and kept alive or revitalized as a saint's name. In the eighten-fiftees and later,
>> literature became a source of given names. So in my family the name Emil originated in the famous educational novel
>> "Emile" by Jean Jacques ROUSSEAU and symbolized a growing resistance against the catholic clerus. En passant, its
>> religous origin was the late Roman martyr AEMILIUS of Carthage who again was a member of the gens Aemilia, one of the
>> most ancient patrician houses at Rome - which of course was not considered by most of the parents. But the linguistic
>> source of this Roman name (from Greek Αιμυλος = smart, crafty) was absolutely disregarded.
>>
>> Günther
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