Two parents.
Four grandparents.
Eight great grandparents.
My great grandparents include Harry Butcher, Violet Mitchell, Frank Shipp, and Vieva Sioska Parmater. I like to say that name: Vieva Sioska. Another name I like is Ralph Thrall King. my maternal great grandfather. Thrall strikes me as the name of a Viking, or the lost brother of Thor. Add that to the family name King and you have quite a man. Rounding out the eight are Fanny Tewksbury, Arthur Baldwin and Reba Louise Williams.
The first of my great grandparents was born in 1855 and in 1963, the year I was born, the last passed away. Some of them were alive during the Civil War. I have a few Confederate dollars and a copy of a diary passed down from Vieva Sioska’s father’s chronicling his years in the Ohio 29th, defending Culp’s Hill at the Battle of Gettysburg against Confederate advances. His entries, though detailed, are remarkably understated in light of all that happened early in July 1863 and all it means to our country when viewed through the lens granted by the passage of time.
One or more of my great grandparents were alive during the Spanish American War and some fought in World War I, they endured the Great Depression, and many saw their sons, and daughters, serve either directly or indirectly in the Second World War. My great grandparents also witnessed the eruption of Krakatau, the Dust Bowl years and the Great Earthquake that devastated San Francisco. They saw the production of the Model T, the sinking of the Titanic and the launch of Sputnik.
Most of my great grandparents spent the majority of their lives in New York, Ohio or Michigan during the great Westward Expansion. One came east having been born in Hawaii and another came from New Zealand. I have visited many of the places from which they came. How these places must have changed. My great grandparents were remarkable people during remarkable times. I think about them, who they were and what they did, a lot. Their names, I believe, were a reflection of their time but of course, were dictated by those who preceded them, by their family, likely by their great grandparents.
I, Samuel Woods Butcher, was named after my father, also Samuel Butcher. My middle name, Woods, comes from my maternal uncle, Woods King and my maternal grandfather, also Woods King who passed away when my mother was very young. But Woods, for me a middle name and for my uncle and grandfather a first name, was the family name of my great great grandmother, Lucinda Adeline Woods, whose lineage can be traced back to 1694 when my 6th great grandfather lived in Groton Massachusetts. The King family goes back to my 8th great grandfather you lived in nearby Marshfield Massachusetts in the late 1600’s.
My family name, Butcher, can also be traced many generations. My father, Samuel Shipp Butcher was likely named for his great grandfather, Samuel J. Butcher, named after his father who emigrated from England in the 1800s to settle in Michigan where his descendents have lived for generations.
We have no choice with our family name. We are born into it. For better or worse women, until recently, had little choice but to lose their family name or banish it to the status of a middle name if they married. My mother (Sally) and sister (Madeline) were not given middle names. What will our daughters, Georgia Baldwin and Charlotte Louise do with their middle names, or their family names for that matter, as they grow older?
Why do we give children the names that we do? Georgia was named to honor her great grandmother, Georgina Denton Hotchkiss. Charlotte was named after her great aunt Charlotte Clark but also after Charlotte Snyder Turgeon who was the granddaughter of Karen’s great great grandmother (Karen’s first cousin twice removed if you are keeping track) who Karen’s family always knew as Aunt Charlotte. When discussing boy names both Karen and I settled on Max until Karen’s father wondered about the wisdom of having a child with a name shared by countless dogs across the country. Though I reminded him that there were also countless dogs named Sam he was not dissuaded. So Max became Lincoln Maxwell Butcher, Lincoln, a family name on Karen’s side that includes Benjamin Lincoln of Revolutionary War fame. I note, however, that for years Max could be amused in any yard as long as there was a ball, a trait shared with many dogs, so maybe sharing a name with a significant percentage of the domestic canine population was appropriate.
Karen tells me that her parents approached the child naming process differently. Both Casey and Dick were schoolteachers and so they selected names for Ted (Theodore), Karen and Steve because all of the Teds, Karens and Steves that they had in classes and that they knew in life seemed like decent honest people. You will not find Theodore, Karen or Steve in the Clark or Hotchkiss genealogy, at least not in close proximity. But Casey and Dick did honor their ancestors in middle names, those being Hotchkiss, Nowell and Bishop.
So what is in a name? Are names simply arbitrary labels? Paraphrasing Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “that which we call a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet”. Maybe so but I like to think that we are shaped by our names and that we, in turn, shape the name we are given. Certainly the Sams and Karens in our parents’ lives made an impression on Sam, Sally, Casey and Dick such that they decided to give us the names we have. And exemplary women had an influence on the names Karen and I chose for Georgia and Charlotte. As for Max, well, I have never met a Max, canine or otherwise, that I didn’t like.
Comments