N is for Names

One thing that most people don’t get to choose for themselves is their name. And, for me, that’s a good thing. I remember thinking, when I was a child, that Gertrude might be a good name, that I’d like to have it. I don’t mean to insult a reader, but I don’t think I’d like to have that name now. But . . . neither do I like my real name.

My name, Sandra Kay, came from a book that my mother was reading while she was pregnant with me, so she said. I tried to google a book in the 1930s with a character by that name, but I couldn’t find one. And so I went through life  being called “Sandra” and hating it. I vowed to myself after I graduated from high school that I’d never again be called “Sandra” by choice. I became “Sandy” when I went to Mississippi College in September 1958 and have been called that ever since. My husband, Frank, is so protective of me and my name that if someone calls on the phone and asks for “Sandra,” he corrects them and says that he or she may speak to “Sandy.” Another thing about my name . . . I never use my maiden name and my married name together. My maiden name is Cheatham, pronounced Cheat-um, if you please. Say all three names together, and you get Sandy Cheatham Young . . . I guess as opposed to Cheatham Old. Strange name!

I wish I knew the thinking behind the names in my mother’s family because some of them are really strange, some not so much. You can decide for yourself:

·     Clyde – Not so strange. He died way before any of us grandchildren came along.

·     Edwin – Another good name. His nickname, though, was Ty because he loved to play baseball during the time when Ty Cobb was a star. Since his last name was Kolb (pronounced Cobb), that made sense, I guess.

·     Oma Lea – Where did that come from? My cousins JoAnn and Marilyn called her Auntie Jesus because she gave them a Bible book. I called her Big Auntie because she was the oldest aunt.

·     Waymon – Not Raymond. I think I’ve heard of only one more person named Waymon. Very strange man. No one knew him very well. In fact, some of the first cousins don’t even remember him. I do, though. Here are some statistics on the name Waymon:

WAYMON is ranked as the 4446th most popular given name in the United States with an estimated population of 2,948.

This name is in the 98th percentile, this means that nearly 2% of all the first names are more popular.

·     Nina Mae – My mother. She went by both names to several in our family, but I knew her only as Nina.A distant cousin sent me a copy of the 1926 Logansport (LA) High School yearbook page with my mother’s picture. Under it, I found that she was called Neenie back then. Toward the end of her life, she began to say, when I introduced her to my friends as Nina, that her friends called her Neena. What? My mother was a feisty lady who said exactly what was on her mind. Can you see a resemblance between our granddaughter, Corey, and my mother when both of them were about seventeen?

·     Inez – Not too strange, I guess. She and my mother were best friends and favorite sisters until Auntie died. Her husband died three months after she did, and their daughter, JoAnn, came to live with us and gave this only child (me, that is) a sister!

·     Ressie and Tressie – Twins’ names always rhymed back in the day, you know.

·     Orie – Again, I don’t know where this favorite uncle (all of us eight girl cousins loved him the best) got his name, but very few called him this. His siblings called him Chris because there was a mean man in Logansport by this name. It rankled him when they called him that. Orie evidently was a mean little boy. But all of us girl cousins called him Bud. Someone must have taught us to call him that, but I don’t know who. He was wonderful!

My dad’s name was Arlie, and in my lifetime, I’ve known only one other man with this name – my uncle (my dad’s brother-in-law). One of the “founders” of the A-Z April Blogging Challenge is named Arley, but I believe that person is a woman.

Our daughter’s name is Wendy, a very good name for her because it means “wanderer,” and if anyone’s a wanderer, it’s my darlin’ daughter. Every year, she takes a road trip to the South all by herself, working on a photography project. One of her projects in the past was “Southern White Males.”  And now she’s working on a project photographing Confederate monuments before they’re all torn down. She has applied for a grant to help with this one because she’s covering lots of miles from New Mexico to states in the South. By the way, she’s an excellent photographer. Also . . . if she had been a boy when she was born in 1963, she’d been named Frank David and called David. For many reasons, I’m glad she was a girl, but one of them is that by the time that our son was born, we had changed our minds on the name.

Jay already had his nickname before he was born. His real name was Frank Jackson Young, Jr., but he never was called Frank by choice. He was always Jay. His second grade teacher insisted on calling him Frank, and he cried every day. I finally wrote a note to her, telling her that his dad was Frank and that he was Jay. I even had him wear his cute shirt with “Here comes trouble!” on the front and Jay on the back. What she called him didn’t really matter, though, because when the principal decided to split the class because of the number of children, Jay’s first grade teacher insisted that he be put in the new class because she knew how unhappy he was. We were all happy campers!

Just one more name for this post, and I didn’t even know this person. I’ve heard about the poor girl for fifty-six years, though, because my husband went to school with her. Her name was Ophelia Butts. Pretty bad, huh?

-->