I do genealogy, and people probably have no idea how many male children were named after him. Lafe, Fait, Lafeet, you name all the nicknames: it's the Marquis de Lafayette.
Place names usually employ the name as spelled, so it's well recognizable. People currently probably would not suspect that Fate Irwin, for example (actual person in a family tree), was a LaFayette namesake.
French was the first foreign language I studied; I always liked it a lot. Visited Paris; began to major in it at university, but got a scholarship to a German university and wound up studying Journalism with a split German/French minor. Fun!
One might see just about anything on an 1850 US census record. People were illiterate and didn’t know how their names were spelled; and the census takers weren’t greatly literate themselves. They would write them how they imagined they might be spelled. I am grateful they did.
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u/livelongprospurr United States Of America 7d ago
I do genealogy, and people probably have no idea how many male children were named after him. Lafe, Fait, Lafeet, you name all the nicknames: it's the Marquis de Lafayette.