Kidney Trivia
Kidney First Names
Families usually have popular names that repeat from generation to generation and the Kidney family does too. In fact, there are so many boys named John Kidney born in the early 1800's that mapping genealogical data to census data is almost impossible for them. Below is a table of the most popular Kidney first names.
| Male | Female |
|---|---|
| John - 36 | Mary - 19 |
| George - 23 | Sarah - 15 |
| William - 23 | Anne - 11 |
| James - 20 | Rebecca - 8 |
| Charles - 15 | Elizabeth - 7 |
| Robert - 11 | Hannah - 5 |
| Peter - 10 | Gertrude - 4 | Jacob - 9 |
| Henry - 8 |
The 1880 Census
The 1880 Census gives an interesting picture of the American Kidney's. It lists 816 Kidney families residing in the United States.
Of those, 18.5% were recent immigrants, 24.6% were first generation Americans (born in the U.S. of immigrant parents) and 56.8% are probably descendents of
our John/Jan Kidney. It comes long enough after the wave of Irish immigrants from the potato famine (1846-1850), enabling them to have settled and raised their families. Most of these people are in the first generation category. Also, As
the post Civil War prosperity made the "Horatio Alger" American dream [that dream ought to be especially important to Kidney's considering that my
great-great-great-grandfather married into the Alger family] attractive to a new wave of recent immigrants, a host of new Kidney's arrived from Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales, and even Prussia, settling along the Eastern seaboard in areas
where John/Jan Kidney's family had left for the trek west.
Image "The Irish Embarkation, Waterloo Docks, Liverpool" was published in The Illustrated London News in July 6, 1850. Source: Lawrence Collection, National Library of Ireland.
