Hi there ! I am so sorry if this is the wrong place to post but I have NO IDEA where to ask this and I would really love to discuss this. This is a bit more about genealogy than history but hey, genealogy can be our history too so I figured some of you who studied ethnicities etc might be able to help.
I am doing genealogical researches about my family and these two names showed up circa 1850. I was pretty thrilled to have found weird names like this (forgot to mention I am French) and so excited to discover maybe other roots to my family. These were "middle" names with very very French first and last name which makes me think the parents were not from France (and would explain why I can not find any infos on that branch too)
My great great great (and so on) grand mother's name was Antoinette Saphranie Lefebvre, her daughter (my great great (and less on) grand mother) was named Antoinette Ismerie Louise Feuillie. She was born in 1848. These are the only info I could get with the location : they lived in High Normandy, France.
So, besides any infos I could get regarding the origin of those not so French names Saphranie and Ismérie, I would love any infos of historical population exchanges at that time that could have caused a mix like this ? (I'm obvs not a native EN speaker and have no idea how to properly phrase this I am sorry haha) I would love to know a bit more about all of this, but I'm not sure how much this is clear. Feel free to ask questions if there's something you don't understand ! Thank you for the help and understanding !
I'm going to be that person.
Those are French names.
First, in that time period you are dealing with records in longhand. It is extremely easy to read A for O and vice versa. I've dug through record books from the 1820s. Clerks were hired for good handwriting, but the two letters are very close and some clerks obviously got their jobs by nepotism.
I will bet you a box of donuts that your Saphranie is the (then) fairly popular Sophronie. You're just not used to the name so you didn't automatically see it. A variation is Sophronia, more popular in England.
Ismérie is the specifically French version of Ismeria. This is an uncommon name associated with Christian legends of various Black Madonna figures. It's given as the name of the great-aunt of Jesus.
While probably the most famous Black Madonna is Polish, there are around 180 Black Madonnas in southern France.
You can't do genealogy by jumping at given names. (My sister is a long-term ancestor-hunter at a LDS center.) Maybe someone just heard the name and liked it. Maybe it belonged to the nice neighbor who gave them all the baby clothes. Maybe it was a friend who died that they are memorializing.
There is a tiny shadow of a possible Polish connection here, but done in a French form, not too likely.
Doing it step by step like you have been is the right way. Your family may have been in France under the Roman Empire, or before! Good luck seeing how far back it goes.