Speaking of names, I got a whole new insight into names, and how... well, sort of fictional they probably are, mostly, after my sister in law, the wife of one of N's brothers, got interested in genealogy and scrutinized my hubby's family tree.
It could hardly have been more interesting, for the difference between the assumed and the real.
For starters, N's paternal family had always understood themselves to be (certainly within the memory of N and siblings and his father and his grandparents) direct descendents of an Englishman, a very distinguished early American, one of whom all of you have heard, and to whose portrait a definite physical resemblance of N and some of his four siblings had oft been noted in family conversation.
N and his bros and sister often wrote school papers about this distinguished figure whose last name they proudly shared.
As it happens, though, the odd and I think not very happily married sister in law has shown, the actual way the family came by the English name was not through descendence from the distinguished gentleman at all.
It seems that some generations back (I have a chart, but it's too much trouble to look up the detail) a German (not English) fellow changed his German name, which bore a faint resemblance to the currently in-use English one, for the English one. He became, instead of Peter Heinrichs, say, a P. Henry. (Not really; I'm making up an illustration.)
The reason for this name change is unknown, though my sister in law speculates that, based on where in Germany they immigrated from and because both "Heinrich"'s name and his wife's could be either German or Jewish, and at that time Jews were not permitted to hold government offices, it is possible that the name change, and also joining a Lutheran Church, were steps taken to permit his employment by the Post Office. That is pure speculation, though it is not speculation that a German or German-Jewish Postmaster in a little town in Virginia, and not the Brit the children had shown the portrait of in Show and Tell, was their ancestor.
Now that's on N's father's side.
Sister in law did mother's side, too.
N's mother, who died last month, was a pretty woman, French, brunette, blue eyes, raised in New Orleans, a very Francophile family, with her parents speaking French at home, the daughters all having French first names.
Well, we thought N's mother was French.
There had been some papers the children found in the attic and thought interesting, but N's father had said they would upset his mother, and the children were not to speak of it, and the incident was almost forgotten.
There had been, when the children were grown, a trip planned to visit relatives in France, for which N's mother had had to obtain a passport, which required a birth certificate, which, N's sister observed, categorized N's mother's race as "Colored."
Some research done then discovered a remarkable story, and one that explained how N's grandfather came to be so dark-complected. The short version is that N's Grandpa's grandmother was a freed slave who was the common law second wife of a white man who also had a white family. Essentially, he was a bigamist. N's black (or black and Cherokee, there are two stories) great great grandmother, who operated a dance hall, made a home with this man for many years, and they had several children together. One of them was a son whose own son was the father of N's Grandpa. The black, common-law wife and her children used the same (French) family name as did the white wife and family.
Let's say the French family name that was taken by the freed slave and her children, and that was therefore N's mother's maiden name, was Montard. (It wasn't.)
Well, the sister in law got to work on the Montards, and discovered that the last Montard she could trace the family back to hadn't started out as a Montard at all. He wasn't French, he was Spanish, and Montard had been his choice over his actual name, Montez (say).
Now, my sister in law was unable to ascertain the reason for the name change from Montez to Montard and the assumption of the strong identification with all things French, which followed a family move from Spain to France and on to New Orleans, but her speculation here is that Senor Montez's reason for an identity-change might have had something to do with wanting to escape the taint of his early profession, which was privateering. Privateers were essentially licensed pirates.
Ever since my sister in law discovered that N's English (paternal) origins were German, and his French (maternal) origins were Spanish and African, I've thought of names as sort of... well, like... hats. They come and go. |
