Celebrate Your Name Week continues with “AKA Thursday”. CYNW is a week filled with fun ways for you to celebrate your own name as well as the names of other people. Each day is dedicated to a particular way to celebrate names. Genealogists can easily adapt these topics into something that will inspire them to delve deeper into their own family history.
Celebrate Your Name Week takes place this year between Sunday, March 6 and Saturday, March 12, 2011. If you are just learning about CYNW today, don’t worry. There isn’t any rule against jumping in and participating today, and there isn’t any reason why you couldn’t still do the suggested activities for the days that you have skipped over. The idea is to take the time to learn some interesting things about your name, and the names of other people. You might end up learning something new about yourself. Genealogists can take the theme for each day, and use it as motivation to learn more about their own family history.
Yesterday was “Learn What Your Name Means Wednesday”. If you are playing along, then you spent a few moments yesterday looking up the meaning behind your name. If you wanted to, I suppose that you could browse through several different websites that discuss meanings of names, and compare them to get a “big picture” view of what your name means. Personally, I found that using just one website was enough for me.
Today is “AKA Thursday”. AKA stands for “also known as”. This is a day to explore the nicknames, aliases, or other made up names that you use. My name is Jennifer, but I almost always go by “Jen” instead. I’ve been doing so for years. If you use Twitter, then you probably have an alias. Some people do use their first name, or even their first and last name as their Twitter alias. Most people, however, choose a phrase that they feel fits them, without having to use their actual name.
If you play World of Warcraft, then you have a main character that you may have grown very attached to. The people whom you play the game with know you by this alias, instead of by your real name. It’s possible that you might be using your main character’s name, instead of your real name, in other places online as well. Lots of people use their main’s name as their Twitter alias, or as the name they go by when they podcast or blog.
Genealogists can take “AKA Thursday” as an opportunity to explore the nicknames that their relatives and ancestors went by. I have an ancestor who went by the name “Fritz”, and whom is always referred to by living relatives as “Fritz”, but “Fritz” wasn’t his actual name. I knew someone who had a brother who shared the same first name as their father. The brother went by “Junior” for years. You might have ancestors who used an alias or nickname, instead of their given name, in order to make things less confusing.
Image by Jack Dorsey on Flickr