Reading some history about immigrants and their name changes (not at Ellis Island, obviously, since that never happened) made me suddenly wonder about alphabetized lists of names.
It existed by 1880. The first London telephone directory is set up in the modern style, alphabetized last name first, comma alphabetized first names or initials within a surname.
The first U.S. census in 1790 doesn’t do this. It lumps together people whose first names start with the same letter: John, James, Joseph.
An 1810 census listing does the same thing only by last names: Bird, Battles, Bisby.
So sometime mid-19th century. I poked around some other census forms but didn’t find anything useful. The original house-by-house forms are all I saw. The first American telephone directory, New Haven 1878, has so few subscribers that they are all listed haphazardly on one page.
Could modern alphabetization be a British innovation?
According to Wikipedia, “Alphabetical order was first used in the 1st millennium BC by Northwest Semitic scribes using the Abjad system.” It also says “In the 1st century BC, Roman writer Varro compiled alphabetic lists of authors and titles.”, which would presumably meet your definition of a “list of names”.
Your link says, “The first directory in New York City was The New-York Directory, published by David Carroll Franks in 1786.” I checked and that clusters last names by letter, but doesn’t alphabetize within the letter. Longworth’s American almanack, New-York register, and city directory for 1813, however, does the full last name, first name, with the first name alphabetized within a last name regime.
I’m seeing a slow progression to a standard. I assume that past of the barrier was the extra work involved in sorting and checking thousands of names. Longworth lists about 15,000 and that was a small fraction of the population. Manhattan had over 100,000 at the time.
McPherson certainly had this problem, with 6400 entries.
Still, from our modern pov, the sheer utility of the better alphabetization should be worth paying for. I’m somewhat surprised that it lagged for so long.
How long must a list be before you can conclude that it’s deliberately rather than coincidentally alphabetized? There must be countless short lists from ancient times (containing, say, just one, two, or three names) that are in alphabetical order. Who’s to say whether or not the writer ordered them that way on purpose?
I think you’ll find that the ancient Romans had an elaborate system for personal names, which included both individual and inherited components. Ditto for the ancient Chinese (who, while they did not use an alphabet, did have the concept of lexicographic ordering).
Anyway, even if the sort of names you are interested in appeared only much later in history, it’s still much more likely that the first known lists of them were very short rather than long.
The Romans did not have last names as such. Their praenomen, nomen, and cognomen map rather poorly to our modern conventions. The Chinese did have some ordering concepts but again they map to alphabetization poorly.
I never at any time said they weren’t. Go check: it’s (ironically) a short thread. You haven’t provided any evidence of anything, though, so it doesn’t really matter. Give me a real-world early example and I’ll judge whether it meets my criteria.
I assume that by ‘last name’ you mean ‘inherited surname.’ In that case the nomen (gentilicium) would certainly seem to be a surname; it was passed father-to-child among Roman citizens throughout most of the history of Rome. Julius Caesar’s father was Julius, as was his father, his father before him, and so on. His full name, Gaius Julius Caesar, has three parts just like, say, Henry Stuart of Darnley; indeed the three parts (given name, family name, family branch) appear in the same order.
Yes, daughters took the surname Julia instead of Julius, but male/female surname variation isn’t unusual. The wife of Polish composer Ignacy Dobrzyński took the surname Dobrzyńska.
I agree that the nomen was a family name, although the family, properly gens, probably was thought of somewhat more broadly than modern families. The gens is closer to a clan indicator. By that standard Amerind tribes had clan names. Your example Henry Stuart of Darnley would work in somewhat the same way.
AFAIK, however, the Romans considered Gaius Julius Caesar as a singular whole rather than three individual parts. I know of no examples of even a single reference to Julius Caesar, Gaius, let alone a whole listing. I don’t think it would have occurred to them or made sense if somewhat did it. Nor would Stuart, Henry of Darnley.
I could be wrong, so I say the same thing to you as to psychonaut. Find some evidence of this practice way before 1785, which is the earliest example in this thread.
In Arabic, people are alphabetized according to their given name, not their family name. Even in lists in which the names are transliterated into the Roman alphabet.
I guess the real question would be - why would anyone bother alphabetizing a list of names?
In general, for the following obvious reasons:
the list is too long to scan
-the reason for alphabetizing has to be worth the work to do so,
there is no other order which makes more sense (seniority/prominence/rank, home address or geography, clan name, etc.)
most people have to be relatively literate and there needs to be standards; alphabetical order is meaningless when the alphabet is irrelevant.
Spelling matters too…
I kind of think that the printing press is relevant too. In the days before printing, you would need a really really good reason to copy out a long list multiple times.
This last is somewhat relevant - IIRC from Arabic there are multiple “alphabet orders”; plus, considering for example, old German, or old Cyrillic Russian, there are additional letters that are no longer used, etc.
Similarly, I have a book of the summarized letters of Lord Lisle, one of the last Plantagenets. His letters were collected in an effort to accuse him of treason, the fear being he could be a rallying point for Henry VIII’s rivals. In the days before standardized spelling, his name had a variety of spellings - Lyle, Lysle, Lylle, Lisl, etc. This was typical of most of the spelling of the day - people wrote many words the way they sounded and who was to say what was right? No guarantee any other language, other than perhaps Latin, was formal enough in the Good Old Days for consistency.
I found a list that was ordered alphabetically by last name from 1669. It lists them first name first, last name last. Eg:
James Eggelston
Tho: Eggelston
Josias Eleswort
Edward Elmor
vpon F.
Mr. Josep Fitch
Thomas Ford
Walter Fylar
William Filly
William Fish
There are little errors or rather irregularities here and there - Fylar preceded Filly for example. “Vpon” appears to indicated a heading (eg last names beginning with F are below).
Earlier that year they also compiled lists that were not alphabetized, so it wasn’t standard practice.
Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 1636-1776
Volume 2: May 1665 – November, 1677 (page 519)
From “A list taken of all the freemen that liue within the limits of Windsor, in reference to the order of the Generall Court, May 13 : '69, requiring y[sup]e[/sup] same.”
