Saturday, June 27, 2020

Names from the other side

I write about my dad's family most often because they are large personalities and although my relationships there are complex, they are not as toxic as the ones on my mom's side. It also helps that genetics run strong on the Blake side, all my cousins and their children look like replicas of uncles and grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers. My mother's genes show up in one of my siblings alone, and that's just Colleen's brown eyes. So it is easy to turn my back and ignore them. Healthy, actually. But here are a few thoughts on names.

My grandmother's next oldest sibling is Emily. She was always Emily--her full name was Emily Elizabeth Broadhead. When she married, however, and got a copy of her birth certificate that her father had filled out, she realized that all this time she was actually Elizabeth Emily Broadhead.

Broadhead. It felt like a joke name for the longest time, like one of those medieval names given to point out gross bodily features. Then I started learning archery and saw it differently. So I looked it up. It is an old English name, unlikely to be connected to arrows, but it also has nothing to do with fat foreheads. It is a geographic name, referring to a broad round hill.

The Broadheads, at least the thread that led to me, had several children: Overton, John, James Carr, Archie, Roy, Emily/Elizabeth, Harold, and my grandmother Edith. Their parents were Overton and Mazie. Mazie was an Aiken, two generations from Northern Ireland, the part of Northern Ireland where you can likely see Scotland from your house. Aiken = Adkins.

My mom's father's family are Wibbenmeyers. All the Wibbenmeyers are related and all of them came over at the same time to the same little town in Southeast Missouri, having sent a priest ahead of them to see if it was a worthwhile move. They immigrated first and second class, through New Orleans. All German all the time, marrying other Germans and more Germans for several generations, with heavy names like Christiana and Josephine and Theodosia. Then my great-grandfather Theodore married Emma Rose Donnelly and broke the trend. Her family had been in America for 50 years (more famine refugees), mostly upstate New York. Her mother was a Sarah and she named her oldest Sarah Jo.

I was a Sarah then as well, but just like Elizabeth Emily, I always went by my middle name. I dropped Sarah when I married, in favor of my maiden name in the middle. When I divorced, my lawyer cautioned me against taking Sarah up as a first name for legal reasons (I'd had to do a complicated name change in 2016 already because of the first name disappearing). Could I take it as a middle name?

It didn't feel like mine anymore and I didn't really want it. So I took Sparrow instead and scandalized my former hippie mother who never called me Sarah anyway.


6 comments:

  1. Well. You know I LOVE this. And what a beautiful name: B— S— B.

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    1. Thanks. :) I was tempted by Bee (BBB) but felt more like a sparrow after all.

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  2. I'm fascinated by the German town in Missouri, and the generations who stuck together. Until your great-grandfather.

    I'm curious why you didn't keep Sarah as a middle name, just adding your maiden name as a second middle name? Or was it simply too complicated? And now that you mention it, I think of my middle name (Mary), and know that I'm much more of a Mali these days.

    So I love that you took Sparrow. And amused at your scandalized hippie mother! (Reminds me of my MIL, who was scandalized for reasons that she didn't ever seem to care about or believe in.)

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    1. There are many such german towns in the midwest; most were economic migrants who moved en masse to areas that were similar in climate to Germany. And were still speaking German in the schools and public spaces well into the 20th century. My grandfather spoke a low German dialect as a child even with his Irish mom in the family.

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  3. I so like the density of your writing. And I admire your ability to retain all this familial knowledge. Whenever my mother starts talking about family I must confess I tend to zone out, because I get lost after character #3 is introduced.

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  4. My husband's family was like that -- Germans marrying Germans for generations. His generation was the first to marry non-Germans.

    Sparrow -- I, of course, approve.

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