Tag Archive for Names

Halloween Census Whacking

October 31, 2009 Craig Family History, Genealogy, Oklahoma, United Kingdom

With the crisis of my father’s recent illness and the minor drama of my own, I feel like I’ve been way out of touch the last two weeks.  It’s time get back into the flow of things.   I thought  little census whacking for Halloween would ease my way back into writing.  So I went hunting for Vampires, Zombies, Ghosts, Ghouls, Goblins, Witches and Pumpkins.

Vampires

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the incidence of Vampires is extremely low in the United States.  In 1880,  four Vampires: Otto; Jean; Julianne; and Mary, all in their twenties, were living in Cheyenne,  Wyoming.  They claimed to be actors. In 1870,  there was just one Vampire in the United States, 26 year-old machinist George Vampire.  Of course he lived in New York City.   What happened to these five Vampires  in the 20th century?  Were they forced to leave or did they on their own just pull out up stakes and leave?

According to the World Names Profiler (WNP), Germany and the United States have the greatest incidence of Vampires in the world.  Germany’s statistic is 0.04 per million, while in the U.S., the figure is 0.01 Vampires per million people.  Regionally, the American Vampires are located in Oklahoma, according to the WNP.  The Sooner state has a Vampire index of 1.04 per million.  With a 2008 estimated population of 3,640,000 or so,  there would be about four Vampires in Oklahoma.   I found in public records three listings in Lawton, Oklahoma, for Madonna Vampire.  Unfortunately for her, there are at least thirty people named Buffy in Oklahoma presently.

Zombies

Nearly all the Zombies in the census records turned out to be mis-transcriptions of other names.  The WNP reports no Zombies in the United States.  Public records reviews show about 14 Zombies in various places around the country.

Ghosts

Kraft Ghost of Fayette County, Pennsylvania, and Leonard Ghost of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, both listed on the 1790 federal census appear to be the first two Ghosts in America.  But in the 1900 census, the number of Ghosts expands exponentially.  Most of these “new” Ghosts are Native Americans in the upper Midwest.  The WNP indicates a Ghost index of 18.29 per million in South Dakota and 3.37 per million in Nebraska.  South Dakota’s estimated 2008 population was 804,000, which would yield about 15 Ghosts. Public records reveal about 17 Ghosts in South Dakota (when obvious duplicates are eliminated).

Nebraska’s estimated population is about 1.8 million, suggesting something a bit more than six Ghosts.  I was able to find only one Ghost in Nebraska in public records. The rest seem to have vanished.

And how about Pennsylvania where it seems to have begun for Ghosts in America?   WNP’s Pennsylvania Ghost index is 2.58 per million.   That would mean about 32 Ghosts presently among Pennsylvania’s estimated 12.45 million folks.  I was able to identify 25 Ghosts in Pennsylvania public records after eliminating duplicates and two entries which appeared to refer to religious organizations.

Ghouls

Apparently, the first Ghoul in America was 66 year-old Christian Ghoul of Maryland, a German immigrant.  He appears on the 1870 census.  Few other Ghouls seem to have been counted until the 1900 census, where like the Ghosts, the Ghouls grew rapidly in number.  And like the Ghosts, most of the “new” Ghouls were Indians, living primarily in Tehama County, California.

When it comes to Ghouls, the United States doesn’t even register in the WNP top ten. (Number one is France, with a Ghoul incidence of 4.59 per million; Switzerland is a distant second at 1.92 per million, supporting evidence that the Gauls may be the most Ghoulish people on Earth). (Hey, I just report the facts!)

Within in the U.S., however, Ghouls seem to be concentrated around Las Vegas and Chicago, at least according to the WNP.  Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas, and Will County, Illinois, adjacent to Chicago, were the only two counties in which the WNP found any Ghouls at all. Curiously, public records show no Ghouls in Nevada and six in the Chicago area.  Overall, public records indicate something more than 100 Ghouls in America presently, with perhaps as many as 10% of those in California.   This is the biggest disparity I’ve ever seen between WNP data and public records. [The WNP's FAQs state: "All our names and location data are derived from publicly available telephone directories or national electoral registers, sourced for the period 2000-2005."]

Goblins

A man named Goblin was first in recorded in New York City in the 1850 census.  In 1860 there was still just one Goblin on the census and that was 14-year-old Lucinda Goblin who lived with the Davenport household in Columbia, Missouri.  But just 10 years later, the 1870 census showed that three fourths of the (four) Goblins in the USA lived in North Carolina.  By 1900 however, the number of Goblins in America had increased nearly eight-fold to a total of 33, to be found in every region of the country.

Globally, the number of Goblins in the U.S. doesn’t make the slightest statistical ripple, using WNP data.  Number one is France, again, with  0.2 Goblins per million.  The United Kingdom is far, far, behind with 0.02 per million.

Witches

We all know the history of Witch hunts in America. Surprisingly enough however only one Witch appears on the 1790 census and that would be Peter Witch of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (just what is it with Pennsylvania and Lancaster in particular?).  There was also a Witch in Rutledge County, Alabama, in 1790.  By 1900, Witches were routinely enumerated in the census all over the country.  Sadly, two of them were little boys: Jacob Witch, 10 years old, and his brother, Henry Witch five years old, who were apparently in an orphanage in Las Galinas, Marin County, California.

Turns out that there are far more Witches in the U.K. and Canada than in the USA (the only countries reporting any Witches at all).  The British Witch population (0.5 per million) is concentrated in Newport (Casnewydd), Wales, and the southwest jurisdictions of North Somerset, Bath and Northeast Somerset, as well as the City of Bristol.  There are also a few Witches in Surrey.

According to WNP, Manitoba’s  Witch frequency of 2.93 per million accounts for the whole of Canada’s 0.23 per million Witch index. Manitoba has an estimated population of 1.2 million; all of Canada consists of 31.6 million people. Mathematically, that does not work out.  Unfortunately the WNP provincial map of Manitoba gives no further details.

The U.S. Witch frequency is a comparatively minuscule 0.04 per million.  WNP finds Witches concentrated in Dickinson County, Kansas, and Howard County, Maryland.  A public records search reveals about twelve Witches in  the USA (eliminating commercial enterprises like plumbing and construction ["Ditch Witch"] and fast food restaurants [Fish Witch"]).  None of the Witches were found in Kansas and of the two in Maryland, neither was in Howard County.

Pumpkins

John Pumpkin appears as the only one of his surname on the 1820 census.  He lived in Fayette Count, Kentucky.  Virtually no other Pumpkins are found in the census until 1880.  In that year, Pumpkins were concentrated in two areas of the country: Fresno County, California, and Greene County, Georgia.  The latter jurisdiction included a young lady, 15 years old, named  Etta Pumpkin.  Following a pattern that we’ve seen before, the 1900 census showed a huge increase in the number of Pumpkins in America. Again this had to do with the number of Native Americans enumerated on the census in that year.  The Indian Pumpkins were primarily on reservations in the upper Midwest.  By 1910, however, they were concentrated in Madera County, California, and Cherokee County, Oklahoma.  The Oklahoma Pumpkins included one Mary Pumpkin Gritts.

The WNP data shows the expected distribution of Pumpkins in the USA based on historical data.  South Dakota, Montana, and Oklahoma are leading Pumpkin states, based presumably on the frequency of the name among Indians.

Other “Important” News

While I was whacking away on Halloween themes, I started wondering about some other things. Not only did I find unexpected discrepancies with the usually reliable World Names Profiler, but I also now have reason to question the competence of the Census Bureau, whose data report not a single Fool, Clown, or Jackass has ever been enumerated in Washington, D.C.

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The Guild of One-Name Studies

August 25, 2009 Craig Family History, Genealogy

In recent weeks, we’ve spent some time examining particular surnames and their variants.  We looked at worldwide and regional distributin of names and we tried to determine what is actually a “variant” and what is a mere mis-spelling.  Having been through that experience, I decided that I need to have some more robust guidance on the matter of surnames.  That guidance may come in the form of the Guild of One-Name Studies, of which I have recently become a member.

guild_logo

The UK-based Guild of One-Name Studies is just a bit overthirty years old and is now a world-wide organization of researchers who focus on a partiuclar surname as opposeed to researching particular families.  There is certainly a lot to be gained for all genealogists and famiy historians from one-name research.  The Guild has a wealth of information about thousands of surnames.  And the Guild can be a superb forum for learning to research one name.

If you want information about a surname registered with the Guild, you can go to the Guild’s website and find the names of the Guild members who registered the name and are researching it.  Guild members are required to answer all email inquiries they receive about the surname they have registered as well as all “reply-paid” postal inquiries.  One need not be a Guild member to make an inquiry.

If your surname is not registered with the Guild, then you can register it once you become a Guild member.  Be advised, however, that the Guild is a serious research organization and registering a surname carries a commitment to “collect all references to your registered name or names on a worldwide basis, and strive towards the goal of establishing a substantial body of worldwide data.”  It alos has the afore-mentioned obligation to respond to all inquiries.

Members of the Guild are not required to register surnames.  Indeed, because of t he heavy commitments, teh Guild recommends that new members not register a surname right away.   There are many benefits of membership, such as access to helpful materials, that can be enjoyed without registering a surname.

If you have an interest in the study of names, you’ll find the Guild of One-Name Studies a comfortable and interesting organization.

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Breaking Down A Brick Wall–The Problem with Surnames, Part II

August 12, 2009 Craig Family History, Genealogy

Fifth in a multi-part series

I  had hypothesized that my Gines people were associated with English-speaking people named Gines who came from the West Midlands area.  They came to Virginia and North Carolina and from there moved on to South Carolina and other states of the Deep South, eventually winding up in Louisiana and Texas.   That hypothesis was based on several key facts and assumptions:

  • That Gines was more an English name than anything else;
  • That the “variations” were “mistakes” of spelling or transcription;
  • That there was in fact a migration pattern such as I thought which has been documented;
  • That my Gines people in Louisiana had seemed to have a close relationship with families we know to have come from the Carolinas, such as the Brayboys and LeJays.

All of this made logical sense.  As it turns out, the reality may be much more complex.

I coupled my hypothesized migration pattern with an analysis of surnames for “legitimacy.”  Assuming there’s some validity to the notion, I recognized that the World Names Profiler is not necessarily the state pf the art tool for performing such analysis.  But it works well enough for present purposes here.  In any event, I note that neither “Gines” nor any other of the presumed variants appears in the New Dictionary of American Family Names, an authoritative source.

Without going through all of the analysis again (like all decent science, it’s replicable–try it yourself), here are some conclusions that I drew from the surname analysis:

  • The surname spelled “Gines” is probably overwhelming Spanish, occurring in Spain at a rate five times that of any other country.  (And here is one of the potential issues with the Profiler–it does not give us historical data.  But for established European names not displaced very much, we can probably draw some rough but valid inferences).
  • The name Gines is more likely French than it is English, occurring in France at an average rate more than five times that of the United Kingdom.
  • In the United States, the frequency of the name Gines is 95% of it frequency in France.  The U.S. statistics may be skewed by the large family sizes of LDS members with the name Gines.
  • The rough distribution of Gines-surnamed people seems to follow the five-family group model I have described previously.

So what about the “variations”?  Of course, to use the term “variation,” in some sense suggests that the names are isonyms. The whole issue is whether Gines is a creolization of , let’ say, Guion; or whether Guion is the pidginization of Gines.   The other possibility is that they are completely different names as Green is to Gray.

This is a complicated issue and there are few accessible  rigorous studies on the matter. I will tell what I know from my research. Understand that many of these are broad conclusions with a high degree of ambiguity.

I think that it is clear that “Gines” and “Gynes” as they appear from 1870 on in the United States are the same name–that “Gynes” is a phonetic attempt at “Gines.”  There is no evidence that “Gynes’ occurs anywhere in the U.S. except where “Gines” does or historically has, appeared.

The matter of “Guynes” is rather interesting.  Just looking at it and supposing the English pronunciation, it would appear also to be a phonetic rendering of “Gines.”   Curiously, the name “Guynes” occurs most frequently in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. historically almost always among white people.  In counties where there are whites named Guynes, there are likely to be blacks named “Gines.”  The other curiosity is that as I looked at census records for the states I’ve mentio0ned, I found among the white people named Guynes a high occurence of first names like Edward, Henry, Lewis, and Oscar–all of which occur frequently in the black Gines family! One source says that “Guynes” is not pronounced like “Gines,” but is a variant of the Gowen name.

Now to the name Guion, which is the name  under which we found our subject, the father of Richard Gines.  Guion is clearly a French name.  It is probably not a variation of “Gines.”  I’ve come to the conclusion that the original name of this branch of the family tree was likely “Guion”  (“Guyon” a likely variation).  That of course leaves a couple of big questions.  What makes me conclude that? How did George Guion get his name? And why did his son think the name was “Gines”?  The answers to these questions are all tied up in thee geography and history of Louisiana and Mississippi.  It will take some time to completely unravel that, but I will lay it out as I can over time.  It is fascinating.

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Breaking Down A Brick Wall: The Problem With Surnames

August 9, 2009 Craig Family History, Genealogy

Fourth in a multi-part series

In the comments to the last post  our friend Apple [her blog is Apple's Tree; visit it!] writes:

It certainly seems like the right family. I’ve seen some interesting name variations but how did they get Guion from Gines? Or visa versa. I’d be very comfortable going with this.

That’s the very question presented for our consideration today!  Surnames can prop up  brick wall for far longer than one would think.  The problem could be exacerbated for descendants of formerly enslaved people–who sometimes changed their surnames, if they had surnames, after emancipation.  But, it’s really a potential problem for everybody, especially in a culture like ours which has no indigenous surnames:

Strictly speaking, there are no American surnames. They are all imported, the same as all so-called English surnames have, at different periods, been imported into England, excepting perhaps what remains of the ancient British, Gaelic, and Celtic. But they become American by adoption, just as persons of foreign birth become American citizens by naturalization or domiciliation. Hundreds of these families have been domiciled in this country for over a century and a half; in fact, ever since the early colonial period. By what other nomenclature can they be called?

Amos M. Judson,  A Grammar of American Surnames (Washington: J.F. Sheiry, 1898), p.2

To put it another way:

In the States the wear and tear of names, which in England extends over ten centuries, has been concentrated into one, and instead of half a dozen elements we have sources innumerable. In the early days of the Republic the problem was simpler, for the sparse population was drawn from practically four sources, British, Dutch, French, and German. In the earliest census taken, its interesting to notice the distribution of these names. We find, as we should expect, the French in the south, the Dutch in and around New York, and the Germans in Pennsylvania. But, since the time of the first census (1790), immigrants have crowded in from most countries, civilized and uncivilized, and their changed, distorted, or adapted names form a pathless etymological morass. . . .

The possible variants and derivatives of any given personal name run theoretically into thousands, and in France and Germany, to take the two most important countries of which the surname system is related to our own, there has been no check on this process of differentiation. By contraction, aphesis, apocope, dialect variation, and many other phonetic factors, one favourite name often develops hundreds of forms, many of which appear to have nothing in common with the original.

Ernest Weekley,  Surnames (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. 1916) pp.8-9 (footnote omitted).

Some other factors that affect American genealogical research with respect to surnames are:

  • A general lack of literacy in the population before the advent of universal education.
  • A general lack of standardization of spelling among the literate.
  • Reliance by census takers and  vital records officials on unknowledgeable informants.
  • Mis-pronunciation or a lack of standardized pronunciation of surnames.
  • Regional differences in culture.

These issues will be familiar to anyone who has spent any considerable time in research.  All of them came to bear on my Gines brick wall.

When I was a pre-schooler, I learned that our maternal family name was pronounced with a hard “G” and that it was spelled GINES. It seemed to be an unusual name and as I grew up and used it or heard it used by relatives, listeners would not infrequently say, “What?” or “How do you spell that?” or sometimes rudely, “What kinda name is that?”  My mother would reply, “It’s French.”  She said her father told her that.  But when I started  genealogical research in earnest, it appeared to me that most of the  GINES surnamed people in  the United States had come from England.

I have written before about the five main Gines family groups in the United States.  In sorting out my issue here, we don’t need to disturb the Latino, Pacific Islander, or LDS family groups very much. So we’ll focus on the German/English family groups, and add a bit (or more) of French!

We also can narrow the scope of our inquiry by understanding which name variants are “true” name variants and which are merely mistakes in spelling, transcription, or pronunciation.  I realize that it can be said that “mistakes” in spelling, transcription, or pronunciation are precisely the factors that create “true” separate names or variations.  So here I refer to the “one-off” sort of error that is not repeated to the extent that it becomes the name.

I have previously pointed out that many of my Gines forebears had their names rendered many different ways during the nineteenth century.  For example, Rebecca Maner Gines (1844-1931) was “Beckey Guines” on the 1870 census, Rebecca Gines on her husband’s death certificate;Becky Gines on the 1899 tax rolls of Tensas Parish and then Rebecca Gynes on her own death certificate.  Ed Gines, the brotehr of Richard Gines, was a “Guion” in 1870, “Gines” in 1880, “Genes” in 1900, and “Guynes.”  There are more versions beyond these two examples: Gions, Giones, Guions, Guins, Guines, Ganes, Guyns, and Gaynes.  How can we tell if these are “mistakes” or are legitimate names with independent etymologies?

For answers to that, I turn to World Names Profiler, a service of Public Prfofiler.org.   The designers say that they have data for about 300 million people in 26 different countries, representing a total population of 1 billion people.  They claim that ther hgave 8 million unique surnames.  For more information about the database, see the FAQs posted at this link.

I  realize that there are more sophisticated instruments for the analysis performed below, but this will give us a rough, good-enough notion about the conclusions.

Here’s how it works:

We search for a name, let’s say Guiones for example, using the Profiler. The Profiler will tell us the worldwide distribution of that name.  Click on the video link below and watch what happens when we search for “Guiones.”

Guiones

The Profiler reports:

We could not found an exact match for “GUIONES”. Please search again.

The conclusion must be that this i s not a legitimate name.  It may be  inferred that to the extent that such a spelling ever appeared in public records, the occurrence or frequency thereof was extremely  insignificant.   On the other hand, click on the video link below and watch happens when we search for “Guyns:”

Guyns_SDM

There are matches, but apparently only in the United States.  On the theory that there are no indigenous “American” surnames, we could conclude that “Guyns” is not a “legitimate” surname, but likely a one-off error  in trying to render something else.  This inference is strengthened when the Profiler tells us that the name is found at a significant threshold only in one county in Missouri.  A search of Ancestry.com’s census records locates “Guyns” historically as numbering 19 individuals, all in Oklahoma in 1910; and then literally ones and twos in a couple states between 1910 and 1920.

We can eliminate many of the purported names by showing that they do not exist in any significant number anywhere in the world or that they only occur in the United States and they are not “Native American” names.

How does all this relate to my brick wall problem?  We’ll see that next time.

World Names Profiler is the intellectual property of PublicProfiler, University College London, © copyright 2008

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An “American Name”?

September 5, 2008 Craig Uncategorized

I blogged about this several years ago, but now there’s a startling new development.  The original story goes something like this:

I was in England for a few years and one day driving to work out in East Anglia, there was a story on BBC Radio 2 news about a bank robbery that had occurred the day before.  Apparently, the robbers had left behind a check (or “cheque” to be perfectly British about it) book that might have a clue to their identities.  Based on that bit of evidence, the police were seeking a man and “a woman with an American name,”  said the BBC “presenter.”

I pondered just what would be “an American name”?   Julia Smith?  Maria Gonzales?  Ming Han Lo?   Phan Nyugen?  Alia Kumar?  Soshi Hygashi?   Cha Choy?   Sabine von Wirtz?  Celine Renault?  Margritte Nilsson? Subayo Nkrume? Alexandra Petrovich?   I think you get my point.   It would seem that there are no American names, yet every name is, or could be, an American name.

Now, however, one may be able to find uniquely  American names.    Tim Agazio, a great American with a great “American” name, came across the World Names Profiler and mentioned it the other day at his Genealogy Reviews Online.  Tim apparently had some difficulty with the newly-launched website, but today I was able to go in and conduct searches.

World Names Profiler is a project of Public Profiler,  a research activity based at University College London. UCL claims to have “one of the world’s leading clusters of spatial scientists,” with  the primary goal “to link world class spatial science research to cutting edge public sector applications.”  This year, they’ve launched PublicProfiles ( to “deliver a comprehensive picture of UK neighbourhoods using multiple public domain or free data”), OnoMap (“a new way of classifying people and the places they live, based on our common cultural, ethnic and linguistic roots”), and World Names Profiler.

World Names Profiler “utilises a range of new and up to date data sources to examine where in the world people with your surname are found.”   The database is made up of information collected from telephone directories and election registers for 26 countries, sourced during the period 2000-2005.  When a name is place in the “Name Search” box, the output is a map and a set of statistics that describe the “frequency per million people” in particular countries with that name. It goes down to the top cities and regions in the world for a particular surname as well.  It also sets out the top forenames associated with a particular surname.

Click on Pictures to Enlarge

World Names Profiler

I ran some of my ancestral surnames in World Names Profiler. Some of the results were surprises, some were not.  For example, “Manson” is distributed mainly in the English-speaking world, with New Zealand leading the pack with 315.44 Mansons per million Kiwis (in a population of 4.3 million, however, that’s only about 1,350 people).  The USA is fifth in number of Mansons per million with 28.43 (again, however, with a population of 300 million, that’s about 9,000 people–the U.S. Census Bureau in 1990 counted slightly more than 10,000 Mansons).

“Manson” Search Result in World Names Profiler

My ancestral name Brayboy occurs exclusively in the United States, so there is apparently such a thing as an American name; which is not surprising, since the Brayboys most likely are descendants of Native Americans, whose names are the original American names.

The World Names Profiler has two other tabs labeled “Area Search” and Ethnicity Search.” Both are described as “under construction.”

Now to really find things interesting, we go to the associated application called OnoMap. It is described as “is a research methodology, based on an academic project, which allows users to classify any list of names into groups of common cultural ethnic and linguistic origin using surnames and forenames.” (Emphasis in original).

OnoMap

Here a forename and a surname are placed into the search box.  After a word-controlled security check, the application returns a description of the person’s ethnicity based on the name.  It asks if the user agrees with the assigned ethnicity. If the user disagrees, there is a feedback page where the user may select from a number of other choices–which is the point of the research tool.  There is also a space for comments.

Top: OnoMap guesses my ethnicity.

Bottom: I reply.

I tried the  name “Herman Brayboy”; “Herman” being, according the World Names Profiler, the top forename to go with “Brayboy.”  OnoMap says the ethnicity of this name and person is “Unclassified.”  So may be there aren’t any “American” names after all.

In any event, I would say that “American” has become a cultural ethnicity–yet it’s missing from the database.  African Americans are very different ethnicly from any ethnic group now extant in Africa, for instance. And how about every other native born American?  Aren’t all of us over here ethnicly distinct from our forebears?  Or not?  Perhaps that’s another question worthy of research.

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How About "Irena Does the Macarena"?

July 24, 2008 Craig Uncategorized

A New Zealand judge has taken extraordinary steps in a custody case involving a child wiith an unusual name.

Family Court judge Rob Murfitt [found] a girl had been named Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii.

He ordered the girl, the subject of a custody battle, to be placed in court guardianship so her name could be changed.

A lawyer had reported the nine-year-old was so embarrassed about her name that she had not revealed it to her friends and was otherwise known as “K”.

. . .

“It makes a fool of the child and sets her up with a social disability and handicap,” the judge said.

Read more in the Sydney Morning Herald.

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One More Name . . .

January 25, 2008 Craig Uncategorized

I’ve just discovered a Kansas City cousin named Dorothy Long Gunn (1916-1998). She would be my mother’s first cousin, both of them being granddaughters of James William Long (1866-1945).

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Yes, Virginia, You Are a Hamm

January 20, 2008 Craig Uncategorized

I’m not sure I wanted to get into this, but, oh, well . . . . One of the books mentioned on my recent reading list is Bertha Venation by Larry Ashmead, who’s spent decades collecting funny names of real people. The post prompted this comment from Thomas MacEntee of Destination: Austin Family, in which he lists quite a few funny names. Just for the heck of it, I decided to try and find some of them . . . . and,

1. There are more “Rosie Cheeks” in America than you’d care to know.

2. Up until 1930, “Charity Cases” were widespread around the country. On the first census of the Depression [1930], there’s just one!

3. The 190 census shows “Della Ware” from coast to coast.

4. Emma Grate came from Germany in 1865 [true!].

5. Just five “Emma Grants” applied for U.S. passports between 1873 and 1925, while approximately 65 “Emma Grants” entered the United States. One “Emmy Grant” came from Canada in 1931.

6. For decency’s sake, I’ll just note that the name “Eileen Dover” is way more popular than it ought to be.

7. The 1910 census shows two women in Manhattan who are “Helen Bedd” [a mother and daughter, no less!].

8. I couldn’t find “Ida Slapter,” but there are numerous people named “Ida Kister.”

9. California and Texas each have six women who are “Robyn Banks.”

10. And census records report at least 32 Virginia Hamms!

Check out Thomas’ s comment for more names.

5 comments

He Certainly Deserves An Eternal Reward

June 24, 2007 Craig Uncategorized

Chris over at The Genealogue frequently spots and highlights unusual names. Recently, he had these (1, 2, 3). I don’t know if he’s seen the 1880 census for Clinton County, Iowa.

On that census, there’s a nineteen year old grocery clerk, the son of German immigrants. Fredrick and Lisette Lindloff apparently named their son “Through.” That by itself would be strange, but it gets better. Professor Murray Heller explains in his 1975 introduction to N.N. Puckett’s work, Black Names in America, that the young man’s full name was Through Much Trial and Tribulation We Enter the Kingdom of Heaven Lindloff.

Born in 1881, “Through” died on March 11, 1947, and presumably fulfilled his eponymous admonition.

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