New Post
Search
Help
ArchivesRe: Usage of Sabrina
in reply to a message by Siri
I have just spent over an hour looking at census records on Ancestry.com. In 1850, the first year every person was listed by name in the US census, there are 1,544 women and girls listed as Sabrina, and 1,644 listed as Sabina, in the index to the censuses. Of course the problem is that both census takers and the people who indexed them made mistakes, so I tried to find a woman who was definitely listed as Sabrina in two successive censuses. That turned out to be hard to find, but I think I managed it with a woman called Sabrina Thompson, living in Summit County, Ohio, in 1850 and 1860. She was the wife of Hiram Thompson, and was born in New Hampshire around 1806. Interestingly, the index to the 1850 census lists her as Sabina, but when I examined the actual census record it looked more like Sabrina to me.
So Sabrina existed in the 19th century, but it was rare -- so rare that census takers seem to have frequently confused it with Sabina or misunderstood it completely. Another example I found was Sabrina in one census but "Subline" in the next. Subline is so odd that I think it's likely the woman's real name was Sabrina, but we can't be sure without further investigation. :)
So Sabrina existed in the 19th century, but it was rare -- so rare that census takers seem to have frequently confused it with Sabina or misunderstood it completely. Another example I found was Sabrina in one census but "Subline" in the next. Subline is so odd that I think it's likely the woman's real name was Sabrina, but we can't be sure without further investigation. :)
1
Replies
Confused! (I know nothing about the topic, or much about US censuses: just trying to understand out what you wrote.) The numbers 1544 and 1644 in your message are confusing: two random numbers agreeing in the last two digits is near 1%: and since you said Sabrina was very rare, ... I am suspecting I am misreading that sentence.
1
Yup, it is a coincidence, but that is what the numbers are: there are exactly 100 more women listed in the index to the 1850 census on Ancestry.com named Sabina than there are women named Sabrina. It's not a mistake, just a random fact. :)
That makes both Sabina and Sabrina rare. There are 2,088 women named Wealthy; 19,907 named Almira; and 1,343,878 named Mary in the indexes to the 1850 census.
That makes both Sabina and Sabrina rare. There are 2,088 women named Wealthy; 19,907 named Almira; and 1,343,878 named Mary in the indexes to the 1850 census.
1
Thanks, I understand ... such 1% occurrences do happen if you quote numbers often, well, about once every hundred times :-) That was a side issue.
What had confused me primarily was that you probably meant that two rare names Sabina and Sabrina were being confused, where as I misread the pragmatics of your sentence and concluded that you meant that the rare name Sabrina was being confused with a more common name Sabina.
That was confusing, because, if any significant number (say more than 50) of the 1644 people listed as Sabina's were actually Sabrina's (and none confused the other way), then Sabrina was more common than Sabina!
What had confused me primarily was that you probably meant that two rare names Sabina and Sabrina were being confused, where as I misread the pragmatics of your sentence and concluded that you meant that the rare name Sabrina was being confused with a more common name Sabina.
That was confusing, because, if any significant number (say more than 50) of the 1644 people listed as Sabina's were actually Sabrina's (and none confused the other way), then Sabrina was more common than Sabina!
1