We’re getting close to the dog days of summer and, while monsoon season started here in Tucson about three weeks ago, we haven’t had any recent rain. That might be changing, though, because the weather man (who is never wrong???) is predicting a high chance of rain for the next couple of weeks. The only problem with that is that monsoon rain is spotty. It can pour half a mile away, but we never get a drop. Therefore, we’ll have to see how this plays out. . . .maybe a lot, maybe nothing or maybe something in between.

However, it is time for Randy Seaver’s weekly challenge for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:

1) We all have many names (given, middle, surname, nickname) in our ancestry, whether we know all of them or not. 

2)  Do you have “A Name That Runs in Your Family”  Is there a first name — or nickname — that keeps repeating generation after generation in your tree? Share the name, the pattern, and your best guess as to why it stuck.

In modern times, Michael is a name that appears off and on in both my family tree and that of my husband.

However, I’m going to jump way back in time to the 1600s in my maternal grandfather’s branch of the family and go with an unusual given name, both then and now.

William Bucknam is one of my immigrant colonial Massachusetts ancestors. He married a woman named Sarah (MNU) and had nine children.

I descend from their first child, named Joses, born 3 July 1647 in Charlestown, Suffolk, Massachusetts, so I have:

Joses (1647-1694)
Joses (1667-1741)
Joses (1692-1757)

James (1725-1799)

Joses (1761-1835) – This Joses is one of my Revolutionary War ancestors.

I then descend from a daughter, Mary Goddard Bucknam, but Joses and Abigail (Hay) Bucknam had eleven children and their eldest son was named Joses (1793-after 1840).

However, by the 1800s, when the named continued in the family, it was modernized to the much more common Joseph.

What is the origin of the name Joses? It is a Greek variation of Joseph. A family historian in 1909 suggested that the first Joses was name for the Rev. Joses Glover, a Puritan minister who died at sea in 1638 on the way to Massachusetts. Rev. Glover had with him the first printing press that reached the colonies and was used to found the Harvard Library press in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Bucknam origins in England are unknown, but Rev. Glover served the parish of Sutton, Surrey, England. Rev. Glover’s widow and son, also Joses, remained in the Charlestown area, making it very possible that my Joses was named in memory of this minister and/or his son, Joses.

Thanks, Randy, for this week’s challenge.