Made In America - Bill Bryson [77]
Although these memorable appellations naturally attract our attention, they were not in fact all that numerous. Careful tabulation has shown that no more than 4 per cent of Puritan children were given unconventional names. Most infants were in fact endowed with names that were unimaginative to the point of timidity. Just three names – Sarah, Elizabeth and Mary – accounted for more than half of all the females christened in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s.31 Where parents applied more adventurous names, generally it was not to venerate the Bible, but to honour some progenitor – as with the celebrated clergyman and author Cotton Mather, who was named not for that useful fibre, but for his mother Maria Cotton (who was, entirely incidentally, the stepsister of her husband, Increase Mather, and thus was not only Cotton’s mother but simultaneously his aunt).32
By the turn of the eighteenth century, striking forenames had fallen out of use almost entirely. At the same time, there arose a tendency to encourage a measure of uniformity with surnames. In Britain family names often came, indeed still come, with a variety of acceptable spellings: Lea/Leigh/Lee, More/Mohr/Moore, Coke/Cook, Cooper/Cowper, Smith/Smythe (and even in my acquaintance Shmith). Early on in America names tended to standardize around a single simplified spelling, so that Browne generally became Brown, Hull became Hall, Newsholme became Newsom and so on.33
From the earliest days, immigrants from non-English-speaking countries likewise adapted their names to ease their way into American society. Paul Revere’s father, a French Huguenot refugee, arrived in America as Apollos Rivoire.34 James Bowdoin, the Massachusetts revolutionary leader and founder of Bowdoin College, was the son of a Pierre Baudoin. George Custer, of Last Stand fame, emerged from a long line of Kösters. The Rockefellers began as Roggenfelders, the Westinghouses as Wistinghausens. Billy Sunday, the baseball player and evangelist, came from a family of Sonntags. Buffalo Bill Cody’s family name was adapted from Kothe. President Hoover’s forebears were Hubers.35 Wendell Willkie’s father was named Willcke.
Often the transition was relatively straightforward. Langestraet easily became Longstreet, as Wannemacher turned naturally into Wanamaker, Schumacher into Shoemaker, Jung into Young, Schmidt and Müller into Smith and Miller, Blumental into Bloomingdale, Braun into Brown, Griin into Green, Blum into Bloom, Fjeld into Field, Oehms into Ames, Koch into Cook, Nieuwhuis into Newhouse, Pfoersching into Pershing, Jansson, Jonsson and Johansson into Johnson, Olesen and Olsson into Olsen. Occasionally slightly more ingenuity was required, as when Bon Coeur was turned into Bunker and Wittenachts became Whitenecks. When folk etymology wouldn’t do, direct translation was often the most convenient solution, which is how the French Feuillevert evolved into the Greenleaf in John Greenleaf Whittier. The result is that American surnames often have an Anglo-Saxon homogeneity that belies their origins. Miller and Johnson, for instance, are far more common family names in America than in Britain, and almost entirely because of adoption by Germans and Scandinavians with similar, but other, names.
As America moved into the second half of the