Made In America - Bill Bryson [76]
Abraham Lincoln’s ancestors are recorded in early church and property rolls in such forms as Lyncoln, Linccolne and Linkhorn, Jefferson’s as Giffersonne and Jeffreson, and Andrew Jackson’s as Jaxon, Jackeson, Jakeson and Jakson. John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts (or Masathusets as it appeared on the first colonial-minted coins, place names being equally subject to orthographic variability), sometimes styled himself Wyntropp, which is in fact how he pronounced the name,29 and the records of early colonial towns are so full of multiple spellings for the same name – Mayo/Mayhew, Smith/Smythe, Moore/Muir and so on – as to suggest that few in that busy age saw any special merit or purpose in consistency of spelling or even pronunciation.
As early colonists employed odd spellings, so too they often brought unexpected pronunciations with them. This was particularly the case in Virginia where the leading families had a special fondness for pronouncing their family names in improbable ways, so that Sclater became ‘Slaughter’, Munford became ‘Mumfud’, Randolph was ‘Randall’, Wyatt was ‘Wait’, Devereaux was ‘Deverecks’, Callowhill was ‘Carroll’, Higginson was ‘Hickerson’, Norsworthy was ‘Nazary’, and Taliaferro became a somewhat less than self-evident ‘Tolliver’. Still more unlikely were the Crenshaws, who were said to pronounce the name ‘Granger’, and a branch of the Enroughty clan, which altered the pronunciation to ‘Darby’, evidently as a way of distinguishing themselves from those members who said ‘Enruffty’. Almost always these aberrant pronunciations arose not in the New World but were brought from England, and presumably treasured as rather eccentric heirlooms. In contrast to Britain, where bewildering pronunciations are affectionately preserved, in most cases in America the pronunciations gradually fell into line with their spellings, as when the forebears of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, stopped rhyming the name with ‘south’ and instead made it rhyme with ‘truth’.
The practice was less common in the north but not unknown. Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, the fourteenth President, pronounced his name ‘Purse’ throughout his life, but even such modest phonetic unorthodoxy was rare. New Englanders saved their creative impulses for their forenames, finding a certain comfort in endowing their children with names that denoted virtuous qualities. Among the Mayflower passengers we find Love and Wrastle Brewster, Resolved White, Humility Cooper, Desire Minter and Remember Allerton. Such names, as far as we can tell, appear only among the Mayflower children, suggesting that in 1620 the practice was quite new. We can not be entirely sure because the records are patchy. William Bradford compiled a ‘compleat’ list of Mayflower passengers in which he recorded the names of all of the men and most of the children and menservants, but only a few of the women, as if they were somewhat incidental to the enterprise. We therefore know, for instance, the name of Christopher Martin’s two men-servants, but have no idea what his wife was called. As wives gave up their surnames upon marriage, so it would appear that they relinquished their forenames except among their familiars, being known in the wider world – or at least to William Bradford – simply as ‘Mistress Martin’ or ‘Mistress Jones’.
At first descriptive names were confined to a single virtue: Faith, Hope, Love, Charity, Increase, Continent and the like, but within a generation Puritan parents were giving their children names that positively rang with righteousness: