Anybody know what was with the 19th century American fad of giving Spanish names?

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
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I'm thinking of all the people named Alonzo (Alonzo Hanby), Alonzo Wilder

Or Don Carlos Buell

Or Fernando Wood

Where's this come from? It's not like these people were born in an America with a large Hispanic population.
Did the fashion spread from imitating foreign names or from the small sephardic population that constituted early American Jewry?
 
Fashions in names can have weird explanations, but Fernando HAS been used as an 'English' before, specifically in Elizabethan England, but other than then and a brief spike of popularity in the 19th century it's pretty rare for that spelling to be used.

There could have been a few novels from Spain or set in Spain that made them popular, maybe parents felt like experimenting for a few years, who knows.

It's hard to figure out why names become popular now in the present day and then become hardly used a few years later.
 
I'm thinking of all the people named Alonzo (Alonzo Hanby), Alonzo Wilder

Or Don Carlos Buell

Or Fernando Wood

Where's this come from? It's not like these people were born in an America with a large Hispanic population.
Did the fashion spread from imitating foreign names or from the small sephardic population that constituted early American Jewry?
It is hard to trace these things because they take on a life of their own, especially in people as polarizing as Wood. For Buell it is alleged that he was named as such after his uncle. The timing is a bit off for him to get that name on the volition of his parents as the most famous Don Carlos of the period would have been the trope-namer of the Carlist movement in Spain, which really got started in the 1820s, at least two years after he was born. In theory, he could have been named after Carlos V, the Holy Roman Emperor, but that'd be bizarre. Then again I know a girl whose name is Sara solely because her mother previously had a daughter named Tara and wanted a name for her next daughter that rhymed with the previous one. Because parents are strange.

As for Fernando Wood, there the case seems to be per most sources that his mother was much taken with an English Gothic novel she read some years prior where one of the characters was named Fernando. Had she been born 200 years later, she would have probably named him Edward Cullen or whoever is the main guy in fiddy shades.
 
Back then people still saw spanish culture as an kind of exotic european culture, that still holded influence on literature etc.

So it's not so weird thst it was more "common" among the classical WASP Americans back then, while today spanish names are associated with brown poor people who comes to steel ar jebs
 
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