On lineage, belonging, and becoming

A name is often the first thing we are given—and one of the last things we fully understand.

It arrives before memory, before language, before choice. It is spoken over us, written into records, repeated until it feels inseparable from who we are. And yet, for many people, a name becomes something fragile: altered by time, mispronounced, lost to history, taken by force, or quietly set down.

Long before I chose to write under a different name, I learned that names are not simply labels. They are containers. They hold belonging, expectation, inheritance, and sometimes grief.

This question—What is a name?—is one I’ve followed for much of my life, whether I realized it at the time or not.

What a Name Carries

In genealogy, names are the thread we follow back through time. They appear in registers, census lines, ship manifests, wills, church books. They connect parents to children, families to places, the living to the dead.

But a name carries more than record‑keeping value.

• How someone was claimed—or not.
• How they were seen—or overlooked.
• How they were remembered—or erased.

A name is often how history finds a person again. Without it, someone can disappear entirely, leaving only a blank space where a life once stood.

I have spent years tracing names across continents, watching them change spelling, soften in pronunciation, or vanish altogether. Sometimes the changes were accidental. Sometimes they were necessary. Sometimes they were imposed.

And sometimes, a name is lost not because it was taken—but because it became too heavy to carry.

When a Name Is Taken or Forgotten

There are many ways a name can be taken from a person.

Through enslavement.
Through forced assimilation.
Through adoption without history.
Through immigration paperwork that demanded simplicity over accuracy.
Through marriage, war, religion, or institutional power.

There are also quieter losses. Illness. Memory. Time.

When a name is taken—or no longer recognized—something subtle often happens inside a person. A loosening. A dislocation. Identity becomes unmoored from its original anchor.

I have seen this echoed across generations: people unsure where they belong because the thread was broken before they ever touched it. People carrying a sense of displacement without knowing why.

Names matter because continuity matters. Even when the past is painful, knowing who you came from gives shape to where you stand.

When a Name Is Set Down by Choice

Not all name changes are losses.

Some are acts of survival.

There are moments when a person chooses to separate from a name so completely that it appears, from the outside, like rejection—of family, of lineage, of origin. But often, what looks like severance is actually preservation.

A name can carry expectations a person cannot live under.
It can bind someone to harm, silence, or roles they did not choose.
It can become a reminder of who they were never allowed to be.

Choosing a new name can be an act of reclamation—not of forgetting the past, but of refusing to be defined solely by it.

Not every departure is abandonment. Some are necessary crossings.

Choosing the Name Dúchas Quinn

I write as Dúchas Quinn (pronounced DOO‑khass, with a soft, breathy kh).

Dúchas is an Irish word that speaks to heritage, native spirit, and an inherited sense of belonging that runs deeper than borders or documents. It does not mean possession of the past—it means relationship to it.

When I write, I often sit quietly in a chair in my backyard, the breeze moving gently around me, sunlight warming my face. I close my eyes and let my mind wander. In those moments, imagination carries me far from where I am—back to ancestral days on the Isle. I see verdant hills where goats and sheep graze. I hear the laughter of children running through the fields, half‑believed to be faeries at play.

I ask myself what it was like for my ancestors to live there in the earliest days, and slowly, a story begins to unfold.

In that wandering, I begin to notice how my Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and English threads intertwine—sometimes accurately, sometimes not. I linger over questions that have followed me for years. I think about the Viking incursions and wonder when, and how, that blood may have entered my own veins. I imagine their names, their lives, their temperaments. I wonder whether I am anything like them. I even find myself asking if the mingling of Viking and Irish might be where my hazel eyes originated.

I chose this name not to erase my family of origin, but to speak from a place that holds all of it: the known and the unknown, the documented and the imagined, the honored and the unresolved.

Writing as Dúchas Quinn allows me to stand in conversation with ancestry rather than under its weight. It gives me room to wonder, to speculate, to listen.

In many ways, it is a return—not to a single line, but to the shared human story that continues to reveal itself when we are willing to ask:

Who came before me—and what might their lives still be telling me now?

Becoming, Not Renaming

Names are not static. They are carried, lost, reclaimed, reshaped.

What matters is not whether a name remains unchanged, but whether the person who carries it is allowed to become whole.

Some people spend their lives searching for a name that was taken.
Some spend their lives living inside one that never quite fit.
Some find belonging by returning.
Others find it by choosing anew.

Perhaps the question is not only What is a name?
But also:

Who do we become when we are finally allowed to answer it for ourselves?

Into the Weeds with Dúchas Quinn
Author’s Notes on ancestry, identity, and the stories beneath the surface