Referring to a person by his or her name is only one of several ways of identifying a person. In this paper, I will discuss some examples of different identifying means and, in particular, the usage of names, especially for women, in official records collected from several geographical areas and different socio-economic strata in 17^th century Sweden. In accordance with the patriarchal and hierarchical society of that time, women were mostly denoted by their relationship to men, e.g. to their father, husband or son, and their own name isn’t always given in the notice. However, several women are recorded with their own name with no reference to any man. Some questions about this phenomenon are: Who were named? Why and when was she identified only by her name? Can the fact that a woman named on her own be seen as a sign of either high or low social status? Which women were unnamed in the records? What do these identifying strategies communicate? To penetrate these questions, I will apply a dialogical perspective in combination with gender aspects.