When using foreign language records, make certain you know the gender of names with which you are unfamiliar. Ask someone who knows. Don’t just guess.

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  1. There are names that we recognize now as being either gender – Pat can be Patrick or Patricia and if we hear Francis spoken it could be Francis or Frances.

    Nowadays it is my impression that it is more common to find that Sam is a girl named Samantha rather than a man named Samuel or that Alex is a girl named Alexandra rather than a man named Alexander. But I can’t figure out a Jordan – I think it could be either gender.

    It will be up to the genealogists of the distant future to be as aware of this pheonomenon as we should be of the foreign and uncommon names of our ancestors.

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