Category: Genealogy

Tidy Tidbits: Family Names

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NAMES THAT ARE MEMORABLE

My maternal grandfather was a Texan born in 1894.  While in the service, he went home to Pennsylvania with a good friend where he met and then married his friend’s sister, my grandmother.  My grandfather moved east to Pennsylvania and then together they re-located to Adrian, Michigan where they lived out their lives.   And their house is still standing, but looking a bit smaller.

When I knew him, Granddaddy was still a handsome man, solidly built with a full head of thick white hair and a somewhat leathery face.  He enjoyed the outdoors, was an avid fisherman, and he and my grandmother spent part of the winter in Arizona in their later years.  At home, and especially after retiring, he spent time cultivating a large vegetable garden, “the back 40,” he called it.  Kentucky Wonder green beans, New Zealand spinach (the name was supposed to make it go down better with us kids), and okra (not a vegetable I’d ever encountered before) were some of the bounty of his labors.  I also recall that he was a fan of a daily late afternoon nap, stretched out on the living room couch.  A practice my mother also adopted.  

In his working life, Granddaddy was a traveling salesman for a hardware distributor making calls on stores in the greater Adrian region to sell the Bingham Company’s wares.  Like him, two of his sons were also “drummers” for this firm for a time.  He must have been persuasive since he was successful in the business, but I, his granddaughter, never found him to be much of a conversationalist.  And I was a bit intimidated by his seemingly gruff manner. 

My last vivid memories of him are the weekend we spent in Ohio one summer celebrating his and Grandmommy’s 40thwedding anniversary.  It was a fun family reunion, and all our cousins were in attendance as well as great aunts and uncles I hadn’t previously met.  Sadly, he died only a couple years later when I was fourteen, and I missed the chance to get to know him better.

He was known as Bill and my grandmother was Jean.  But his first and middle names were “Zenith” and “Boone.” That’s a mouthful.  Combine it with a notable last name like “Hancock,” and you’ve got quite a handle.  I got curious about his names and did a bit of research on how often certain names are used.  It turns out that according to Social Security Administration records, Zenith was used as a first name for only 430 babies between 1880 and 2017.  In the year, 1897, six babies were named Zenith, and the first recorded Zenith in the U.S. was in 1875.  Even more surprising, the year that saw the most babies given that name was 2017 with 19.  As far as I can tell, there were no other Zeniths in the family before my grandfather.  Perhaps his parents, William Allen and Sarah Elizabeth, just liked the sound of it and its connotation as the highest. 

Daniel Boone (courtesy of history.com)

His middle name, “Boone,” was easier to trace.  Family lore had had it that somehow, we were related to the famous Daniel Boone.  But I also discovered that the name Boone has occurred most often in Texas.  And my grandfather’s grandfather (his mother’s father) was Nathaniel Boone Burkett, born in 1820, the year Daniel Boone died.  A note in the genealogy site, geni.com, added by another Geni user, states that Mr. Burkett was named after the youngest son of Daniel Boone, a close family friend.  That son was Nathan Boone. One mystery solved.

Bill and Jean Hancock, my grandparents, had four children. (Note that there were almost half a million girls named “Jean” between 1880 and 2017).   They named their oldest son and firstborn for his father and he was Zenith Boone Hancock, Jr.  He was also known as “Bill.”  My mother was next and was just Elizabeth, perhaps for her grandmother, Sarah Elizabeth, but I don’t really know.  The second son was James with Findley (my grandmother’s maiden name).  Lastly, the youngest and third son was christened John Hancock, no middle name, but a very distinctive name for sure. 

Uncle Bill (Z. B. Jr.) married and divorced and had no children so there were no more Zeniths.  The male names given to my cousins were: James, David, John, and Steven, while my parents conferred names from my father’s side on my only brother.  In naming our son, the Chief Penguin and I decided that “Hancock” was a most appropriate middle name. But to answer the unasked question, I don’t believe we are direct descendants of the John Hancock.

DINING OUT

We had heard a bit about and I kept reading about The Rosemary. Finally last weekend, the Chief Penguin and I dined there with friends.  The restaurant that offers dinner is now several doors down from the original Rosemary (serving breakfast and lunch) and is called Rosemary and Thyme.  It is lovely and pleasant and inside doesn’t feel at all like you are in Sarasota. 

Restaurant dining room (Twitter)

The main dining room is large and nicely appointed with dark wood sideboard and attractive tables comfortably spaced.  There is a side room which is longer and narrower with tables and booths closer together.  And, as a third option, you can dine outside in a more casual area.  I ordered the swordfish special which was excellent accompanied by risotto and veggies, while others sampled the tasty grouper, the delectable looking scallops, and the fish soup which got rave reviews.  It’s a great addition to our Sarasota dining repertoire.

Tidy Tidbits: Discovering One’s Forebears

JWF 2 Comments

DELVING INTO ONE’S PAST

In my experience, individuals start getting seriously interested in genealogy, their family’s past, when they hit their 50’s.  Middle age has settled in, the kids are grown or on their way out the door, and curiosity about one’s forebears rises to the fore.  In my extended family, my Uncle John, my mother’s youngest brother, was the one with the bug.  He wrote letters to relevant historical societies, searched archives, and visited Texas where my grandfather was born.  He completed the detailed paper fill-in-the-blanks family tree  forms (invaluable) which were pre-Internet.  To a lesser degree, his older brother, my Uncle Bill who lived in Dallas, assisted.  And being the family’s resident librarian, I was enlisted to investigate the occasional query.  Much of this legwork took place in the 80’s and into the early 90’s.  Long before Geni and well before the rise of Google.

Today researching one’s genealogy is made easier and faster by several online tools.  Perhaps the easiest one to begin with is geni.com.  You can quite easily create your own family tree for free and then go back and add to it as you have more information.  If you want to be made aware of possible matches for people in your tree, then there are several levels of membership for which you pay an annual fee.  I used just the free service for a long time and populated the tree on both sides of my family using the paper data sheets that Uncle John created.  Adding to Geni can be addictive; usually if I go online to add one date or place of birth or death, I end up looking at other records and puzzling about possible missing relatives.  In general, all deceased individuals are viewable by anyone who has set up a Geni account.

I have also found that just Googling a relative’s name and place of residence or year of death can result in a full obituary or a cemetery record with a photo of the gravestone.  Recently, I turned up the 1966 obituary for my great Uncle Ernst who died at the age of 90.  I well remember him, he was a bit confused in his dotage, but I had not known much about his earlier life.  Some families have also created extensive online records going back many generations so if you have a name that was prominent in history or very common, you might well find a treasure trove of data.  My mother’s maiden name is Hancock, and she and her siblings and many previous generations are all online!

My mother also kept some folders of family history, mostly her side, but also some on my father’s family.  I just received these from my sister.  Included was a journal of a train trip my great grandfather, James W. Findley (1849-1905), made across the U.S. in 1873 that my mother had already typed up.  And also a handwritten log of a trip he made by steamship from Philadelphia to Antwerp in 1878.  He was 29, and he spent about two months in Europe.  I’ve just completed the painstaking process of deciphering his account of the crossing and his penciled notes about where he stayed and what he did in Italy, France, Switzerland, and England.  Thanks to the Internet, I’ve found information about his ship and about some of his hotels, several of which exist today in one form or another.  Once I’ve completed my research, I’ll save the transcribed documents as a PDF in Dropbox and share them with my siblings and extended family.

If one becomes really serious about all this research, like my husband’s brother who has identified and documented relatives going back more than ten generations, then there are other sites and services such as ancestry.com and findagrave.com as well as suggested resources on the National Archives website.  However much you choose to do, it can be both a rewarding and a learning experience, providing perspective on those who came before you.

 

TRACKING TWENTY TITLES

In my self-imposed challenge to read twenty books before Sept. 1, I’ve just added another title to my list.

#7  The Heart is a Shifting Sea:  Love and Marriage in Mumbai by Elizabeth Flock

Emotionally impacted by her parents’ divorce and her father’s subsequent failed marriages, journalist Flock was attracted to the kind of love she saw among Indian couples she met.  She worked in Mumbai (aka Bombay) for two years beginning in 2008 and then returned in 2014 and 2015, but she remained in regular contact in those intervening years with three couples with whom she had become close.  Indian society, and Mumbai in particular, were changing rapidly during this time, more marriages were love matches and not arranged, and Western mores were making inroads.

In her book, in alternating chapters, Flock profiles these three couples’ first meeting, their courtship, and then their marriages, each with its own challenges, disappointments and joys.  Two of the couples are different classes of Hindu and the other couple are Sunni Muslims.  Religion and religious observances play a major role for each of them, but their view of love and romance is often influenced by how it’s portrayed in Bollywood films.  This is a fascinating and intimate account of life, love, and sex, that almost reads like a novel, but is nonjudgmental in its presentation.  What Katherine Boo did for the slums outside Mumbai in Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Elizabeth Flock does in even greater depth for marriage.  (~JWFarrington)

 

Notes: Header image from You Tube; It’s a Family from Wacissa UMC. and the book jacket from the author’s website.