Puritan Name Generator

Puritan names came out of a religious movement, not a fashion, and it shows. English Puritans of the late 1500s and 1600s rejected saints' names as too Catholic and turned instead to two sources: the Old Testament (Ezekiel, Jerusha, Mehitabel, Zebulon) and English virtue words that a child could grow into (Prudence, Increase, Thankful, Silence). A smaller and stranger third group were the "hortatory" names, whole sermons compressed into a first name: Fear-God, Fly-Fornication, Praise-God Barebone, and the famous If-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebone. These were rare even in Sussex, where most of them are recorded, but they are the ones people remember.

The Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonists carried all three traditions to New England, and the surnames in the generator are the real ones from those settlements: Winthrop, Bradstreet, Mather, Endicott, Standish, Coffin, Sewall, Brewster. Names like Oceanus Hopkins (born on the Mayflower) and Peregrine White (born aboard ship in Cape Cod harbor) show how families recorded circumstance in a name.

A convincing Puritan name usually pairs a virtue or Old Testament given name with a plain English surname; the effect is austere rather than ornate. Use the hyphenated hortatory names sparingly, one per story is plenty, or the effect turns into parody.