What was in a Name? Culture, Naming Practices and Literacy in the Past

Given names hide crucial information about cultural attitudes and beliefs that sheds light on how parents raised their children and the importance they attached to education and other values. Relying on the 1860 Population census for the province of Zaragoza (Spain; almost 400,000 observations), this article shows that naming practices, captured by whether children bear more or less common names and/or were named after their parents, help predicting their educational outcomes, even after controlling for a host of individual-, household- and community-level confounders. Crucially, these results differ by sex, birth-order, socio-economic status and the urban-rural divide, which allows identifying the mechanisms in place. In particular, bearing a common name is negatively associated with the likelihood of girls attending school and being literate in rural areas. By contrast, being named after parents had a positive influence on boys' education, a pattern that is especially visible for the eldest son from families who have access to land. In addition, the results reported here are stronger in more complex household arrangements. These results therefore stress the role played by inheritance customs and the continuity of the family line on both naming practices and the way that parents allocated resources between their siblings, as well as highlighting the different expectations around the role that sons and daughters played in these societies.