Jacob and Sophia are the top baby names for this year, I just now read at the Yahoo news site. And as I did so, I thought of a conversation several weeks back when my aunt and her grandson came by for supper one evening. Business brings my cousin to town frequently these days, and he had spent the day with his grandmother, asking her to help him and his wife think of names for their first baby, which will be born in a few months. Family names, he wanted, in particular.
And so the conversation continued over supper, since my aunt and her grandson know I enjoy putting together the family history puzzle, and names I have. Names galore. Names from the present back to, well, quite a ways in many cases.
This is actually something I've thought about frequently over the many years I've worked on the history of my various family lines: names. Which ones tend to repeat themselves over and over. Why they repeat. I've often thought that if I did some kind of statistical analysis of the given names of just those family members who are my direct ancestors--from father and mother back through grandparents, their grandparents, and so on--I'd almost certainly find the following names topping the list:
For women, Elizabeth, Mary, probably Ann. For men, John, James, William, Richard. Quite a few Georges and Thomases, a good representation of Samuels.
And how to choose what are our typical family names for my young cousin's new baby (they don't know yet if it's a male or a female and don't want to know until it's born)? My cousin was bewildered, I think, and even overwhelmed when I opened my computer file of charts showing our family tree, with name after name for him and his wife to choose from. A rich smorgasbord. And one that varies according to eras, since names go in and out of fashion.
Because this pattern was so firmly fixed when I came along as a baby, it's a little hard for me to imagine other patterns in which one feels free to shake up a grab bag full of names and pick one or two out at random--or because one fancies this or that particular name. The unwritten rule in my family seems long to have been that one names a baby for someone. It's obligatory to do so. For a family member in most cases, but also for a much-admired community member or religious figure in other cases--especially when so many babies have come along that one has run out of family members to honor with baby names.
I can remember my mother's sister Pauline telling me when I was a little boy, "Yes, I was named Elizabeth for some far-away grandmother in the past." And so I discover as I do family history: both of her father's grandmothers were Elizabeths: Elizabeth Pryor Simpson and Elizabeth Ann Winn Braselton. My aunt Pauline came by her name honestly. The Pauline itself, I discover, was for a favorite cousin of my grandmother's for whom her father Wilson R. Bachelor named his tiny town in the Arkansas River Valley near Fort Smith--Pauline, Arkansas. And the cousin was, I also find, named Pauline Graham Bachelor for Wilson's best friend, a Professor Paul Graham about whom he writes often in his diary, noting evenings the two spent reading scientific articles or serialized novels from Harper's Weekly to each other, or playing the violin together.
Every child in my mother's family (and the same can be said for my father's family, too) was named for someone. My mother's oldest sister and the first-born child was named Samantha for her grandmother Samantha Jane Braselton and Katherine for her other grandmother Catherine Ryan Batchelor. The sister who came after Pauline, Margaret, was named Margaret for her great-aunt Margaret Ryan Sumrall and Frances for her mother's sister Frances Isadora Batchelor. The one son in the family had no choice except to be a junior--William Zachary, Jr.--just as his half-brother, my grandfather's first son by a wife who died in childbirth, was named William Carl. (My grandmother was adamant that the Zachariah, which had run down the paternal family line from the mid-1700s, be shifted to Zachary in the case of her son, because Zachariah sounded hopelessly old-fashioned in contrast to Zachary.)
My mother was a little bit of an exception, as the fifth child, the one for whom names had begun to run out. My grandfather insisted she have my grandmother's name--Hattie--which my grandmother didn't like. And because my grandmother was especially fond of a young woman who did housework for my grandparents at the time my mother was born, a young African-American woman named Clotine, my grandmother pirated the young woman's name and combined a name she liked with her own name Hattie, which irked her, to name my mother.
The last baby, Billie, who was unexpected and came seven years after my mother, had to be given her father's name, my grandmother argued, because my grandfather was dying as she was being born. He died less than two years after her birth. And since a Billie seems to go with a Jean, she got that tag of a middle name to turn it into a typical Southern double-barreled girl's name, one long used to refer to her as if the two names ran together into one: BillieJean.
So in his grandmother's family alone, my young cousin has a fairly extensive set of names from which to choose, particularly if the new baby is a little girl--not to mention, a naming pattern that suggests the importance of fixing on a newborn baby names of relatives who are honored and shown love through the affixing of a name on a new family member. But supposing that he and his wife want to range further back in the past, what kinds of selections might await them there?
As I say, fashions seem to come and go in names. There was that period--through much of the 19th century--when euphonious, vowel-filled names seemed to dominate for women in many Southern families. My mother's Simpson aunts were Elizabeth Arabella, Lela Augusta, and Lula Jane, and all of those euphonious names--Arabella, Augusta, Lela, and Lula--then got handed down to daughters, granddaughters, and nieces for a generation or so until they tended to run their course and become as old-fashioned as camisoles, and were put away in mothballs in the family history attic. I find Camillas, Narcissas, Clarissas, Lucretias, Tranquillas adorning many branches of both sides of my family tree for several generations in the 19th century, but not much before that and not much afterwards. Names that came and went . . . .
Not unlike the Puritan-themed names that held sway for the early period of some of these families in the colonies and on into the 18th century, in which girls were often named Prudence, Piety, Patience, Faith, Mourning, Unity, Philadelphia, etc. Those names are now as gone with the wind as are such long-since discarded male names as Theophilus, Ethelred, Peregrine, or Tristram, all of which I find at some point in the history of some of my families when they began their lives in the colonies.
There are names that are most or less confined to or are distinctive of one particular family line for generations, I find, too. The given name Dennis runs down the lines of my Lindsey family from around 1700 to the present, and is non-existent in any other of my family lines. That given name Zachariah seems to have had quite a run in the Simms family in which it originates: my great-great grandfather Simpson who had his grandfather's name was named for a grandfather Zachariah Simms, so that his name became (confusingly, and resulting in errors of transcription in more than one published history) Zachariah Simms Simpson.
The Harrisons loved to name sons Benjamin, the Whitlocks, Thomas and James, the Pryors, Richard, Joseph, and Samuel, the Brookses, Charles, Thomas, and James, so that any excursion into any one of these families in the past quickly becomes a foray into a bewildering mass of men with the very same name, living at the same times and places in history--an almost insoluble genealogical puzzle of replicated people difficult to sort from one another and to identify as distinct individuals.
There's also the pattern--which makes family history easier at times, since it helps identify the hidden surnames of mothers--of giving the mother's surname as a given name to a son, something my mother did in naming my middle brother Simpson. I can, for instance, follow the Monk lineage in her family tree simply by hopping from the given name of sons named Strachan and Nottingham Monk (two generations of Nottinghams) back to their mothers who bore those names as surnames before they landed the names on sons.
This pattern can result in unfortunate combinations, however, and for that reason ought sometimes to be considered carefully. In the Braselton side of my family, there's a Head family that ties in by marriage in the 1700s back in Maryland, which united in marriage to a Bigger family, and chose to name a son Bigger Head--a choice I would not have made myself, I reckon.
There are also interesting little side-channels of naming patterns in certain regions of the country at certain times, I find. Nineteenth-century Georgia was a particular hotbed of creative nomenclature, for some reason. Georgia families seem to have had a special fondness for florid Roman imperial-sounding names for sons in that period. I find Adolphuses and Augustuses aplenty for a while in some families in Georgia in the early 19th century, along with Vespasians, Tituses, and Gustavuses.
And then there are the Georgia families in the same period in which the names of characters in popular novels of the day suddenly crop up over and over in various families. A grandmother of my grandmother Lindsey (nee Vallie Snead) was named Sarah Ann Amanda Fitzallen Holland, and when I've dug away to find the source of that odd coupling, Amanda Fitzallen, I've discovered that it comes from a Gothic novel written by Regina Maria Roche in 1796, The Children of the Abbey. As does the name Oscar Fitzallen, which had quite a run through Georgia families at the very same time that Amanda Fitzallen romped through them.
The Holland family, which ties together with Snead and Harris families in Georgia and Louisiana in my family tree, had other distinctive naming patterns that I find cropping up in other ancestral lines, but without the flair of the Holland-Harris-Snead triumvirate of families. These families were very fond of landing "male" names on daughters for one reason or another, and seem not have blinked an eye about saddling a baby girl with the name of a father or an uncle. My grandmother had an aunt, for instance, who was born around the time her father died, and for that reason was given his name: Simeon Lawrence Harris. My grandmother also had a niece whose name was George Emmett, and I never thought it was very strange when I met this cousin to call her by a man's name, though I now realize she was named Emmett for her father, and, I suppose, George for some other relative on her mother's side of the family.
I've just found a Hughella in the same set of families, a Bennie Hughella named for uncles Benjamin Roger Harris and Hugh Lawson Harris, both of whom died in the Civil War, and both of whom were, in turn, named for older relatives--Benjamin Roger for his grandfathers Benjamin Harris and Roger Lawson, and Hugh Lawson for his uncle of that name.
Names. On and on they go, and I'm frankly happy not to be in the position of my young cousin and his wife right now, trying to decide how to deal with the conflicting pressure of contemporary culture, which seems to have no interest whatsoever in mining the resources of family trees to choose names for children, and of traditions like those that obtained when I was born, in which it was unthinkable not to name a baby for older family members. And in which it had always been that way.
Maybe the grab bag approach is better, after all. Maybe the other one had us stuck for far too long in a past that deserves to be dead and gone.
When I look at some of the names popping out of the grab bag these days, I do wonder, though. There's nothing in the world wrong with either Jacob or Sophia. There are, in fact, plenty of Jacobs in my Braselton family line, though in no other branches of my family tree--one among several indicators that suggest to me that, if we could figure out the roots of this family in the British Isles, we might very well discover it had been Jewish at some point prior to its emigration to the colonies.
Still, something seems to have been lost, too, in our culture when we're so oblivious to the meaning of given names passed down in families, to their rich resonances and the history they embody, that we're reduced to putting names at random into sacks and pulling them out as a baby comes along. I wouldn't at all have minded meeting Bennie Hughella McCranie, for instance, and asking her what stories she had heard about Benjamin Harris and Hugh and Roger Lawson, who left sufficiently tantalizing clues about their lives (all those gallons of whisky in store receipts for Benjamin, for instance, when he died!) that they surely had stories worth pursuing.
And names worth remembering.
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