Skip to main content

Favorite Name

Favorite Name: Week 6 of #52ancestors

One of the things I like about genealogy is all the names. I'm a credits junkie: I like to watch movie and TV show credits to spot interesting names.

I began with someone else in mind, but then I realized it had to be Nonomoe Glenn. I never heard a story about her name, but the first four children were girls: Mary, Amber, Euphemia, and Joy. I can only surmise that when a fifth girl was born, their father said "No! No more!"  But who knows. They did go on to have two sons after that.

My first thought was a pair of sisters who are cousins of Nonomoe. I think their names are just captivating: Daisie and Delilah Freshwater. They sound like a sunny meadow in springtime.

In both cases they had a maternal grandparent who was a sibling of my great-great-grandmother Minerva Breece. I've been to several Breece reunions, which included descendants of several of the 10 children encompassing Minerva and her siblings, but I don't recall any that were from either of these branches.

Finally, I have a runner-up name that never existed.  My father's maternal grandfather is Montague Augustus Bailey, and my mother's maternal grandfather is Octavus Cicero Chambers. My parents used to joke that they were going to name me Augustus Cicero!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

100 years later: Don Brown in pictures

My father Don (always Donald to his mother) Brown was born 100 years ago, April 29, 1924. He lived to age 90, almost 91. The 100-year mark seems like a fitting time to remember him in pictures. These are by no means comprehensive, but they are what I could find and scan in time for his birthday.   This was taken in November 1924 when he was 6 months old. Posing kids with animals was such a thing back then. Usually horses and dogs, but I have a picture of some of my dad's Wootton cousins when they were little, sitting in a cart being drawn by a goat. This is obviously a World War II photo. Such a youngster! T his must have been shortly after he enlisted. He cheated on the eye test to get in, because he was so near-sighted. He failed twice, but each time he studied the eye chart once his glasses were back on. The army, being the army, never changed it, so he passed on the third try. This is my grandmother Ethel, my father, and baby sister Sarah he met when he came home from the war...

Start

I created this blog nearly 13 years ago. I intended to post about genealogy, both about my personal research and in general, but just never made time for it. Now, thanks to Amy Johnson Crow's #52ancestors initiative, I will at least get started. Appropriately, the topic for week 1 is Start and I'm using that to cover how I got started with genealogy. It began when I was a child, with my mother's mother's Chambers family of Delaware County, Ohio. Like many families, this one had annual reunions. Unlike most, they had a president, secretary, and treasurer, and kept annual minutes of reunion attendees and births, marriages, and deaths over the preceding year. There were always one or two people who were the de facto family genealogists. Each year they'd turn up with some new find, maybe some pictures, or a new branch, or a book. But often it was just a discussion and my mother would jot down notes, trying to keep up with the speaker. Later I'd type them up (b...

Exploration

  Exploration: 2022 week 36 of #52Ancestors When I saw the Exploration topic, my great-uncle Harry Jacob came to mind. I know him best for teaching viticulture at UC Davis, but when I interviewed his son Wendell in 2004 I heard another story. In 1919 after graduating from Ohio State University, Harry went to Alaska with a professor as a student assistant/laborer on a three-masted sailing ship, to the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. At least Wendell thought that was the name, he wasn't sure. A little online research revealed that the professor was Robert F. Griggs, a botany professor from Ohio State. Originally sent to Alaska to study whether kelp beds near Kodiak could be used for fertilizer, he became fascinated with the ongoing effects of a major eruption the year before in 1912. With funding from the National Geographic Society, he led multiple expeditions between 1915 and 1919 to what is now Katmai National Park, and is credited with discovering and naming the Valley of Ten Tho...