I have a small following but I’d really appreciate if any of you can retweet the poster for my husband’s debut #edfringe show. It’s a brilliant show with stories jokes & music about the adventures of being a folk singing comedian when you’re blind. @MichaelRosenYes can you help?

Still, the name Freelove for me always brings to mind the character of Topaz from Dodie Smith's I Capture The Castle, as a hippy before her time, and in my mind's eye she inhabits some of that book's lovely images.

or Thermuthis and Quevedo even if their parents were farmers or bankers, and it could be that her name came via that route. Or her parents were wider thinkers of the day in the 1820s.

Whether it came from the principles of early feminist authors like Mary Wollstonecraft, or just a desire to go against stifling society is open to question. There was a particularly romantic naming period in the 18th century, when babies were called things like Valentine and Love

Until she married a butcher, but that's another story entirely. Freelove as a name seems to have enjoyed some popularity around the Bradford-on-Avon and Trowbridge areas in the later 18th and early 19th centuries.

Spent part of today researching & learning about the fabulously-named Freelove, who ran this pub in Bradford-on-Avon. With that name, you'd be forgiven for thinking she came from the 1960s, but she was born in about 1823 near Semington, and ran The Plough in the 1850s & 60s.

And now, perhaps, I might get some sleep.

And Hyacinth is a bit out there even in the early 19th century, so to fit she’d probably have been Harriet or Henrietta. So, there we are: Arthur, Benjamin, Charles, Diana, Elizabeth, Frances, George and Harriet – the new, more correctly named, Bridgertons.

I struggled a little bit with a D girls’ name, as both Dorothy and Dorcas would be right for the period, but aren’t quite of the right class, so Daphne probably becomes Diana. Francesca obviously becomes Frances.

Colin is less so, but still a bit out of the ordinary, so he’d probably have been Charles. Again, Daphne and Eloise are a bit too far towards the Vatican, so probably Elizabeth instead of Eloise.

But, if they were to fit in with what they ought to have been called, what would they have been? Anthony, Benedict and Gregory are saints’ names, so they’d properly have been something like Arthur, Benjamin and George.

That isn’t to say that this isn’t deliberate – the jarring & exotic nature of alphabetically named Anthony, Benedict, Colin, Daphne, Eloise, Francesca, Gregory and Hyacinth against a more usual naming palette gives a bit of sparkle to her creations.

Plus author Julia Quinn has drawn up the family tree for her fictional family, and there isn’t even a sniff of anything out of the class and background they’re supposed to be.

And there isn’t likely to have been someone of that background in the family history of the Bridgertons at that time. Perhaps the odd person from the French court about, but the British aristocracy make up was firmly CofE, with all the suppression & class belief that entailed.

But if you find a set of children that include Peter, Patrick, Dominic, Nicholas, Paul, Cecilia, Bernadette, Teresa, Berenice and so on, you’ve definitely got some Catholic ancestry in there, probably from someone Irish or perhaps French or Italian.

It’s harder to pick a CofE household from the names of the children, but a Catholic one is distinctive. In the 19th and into the 20th century, names like John, Joseph, James, William, Francis/Frances, Elizabeth, Mary, Jane, and Ann could go either way.

One surprising thing I never expected to gain from having my head in baptism records, day in, day out, was an appreciation of naming patterns. It’s harder to pick a CofE household from the names of the children, but a Catholic one is distinctive.

Things your pet genealogist thinks about while she can’t sleep… …that the Bridgerton siblings’ names are all far too Catholic to be authentically aristocratic for the period in which it’s set, and what those names really should be. What would your guesses be?🧵

A couple of months ago, I had a work experience student. We did a deep dive into women-friendly industrial workplaces & turned up Elise Hassan - manageress of Warminster Castle Laundry. Quite a tale - paralysed parents, Tiger Bay, shipwrecked husbands... https://t.co/8yGs7Savhm

I didn't wake up this morning and expect to be discussing gender politics and Mr Men/Little Miss books live on the radio. But poke the specialist women's historian... 1hr8min in. https://t.co/YdVKoHatzv