In the Genes

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One of the easiest rabbit holes for me to trip into is genealogy.  Now, I know that other people’s ancestry quickly gets boring, so I’m not going to write about that.  But I will note some things that among the few real benefits of our electronic life—how the web has made the search much easier.  I have the advantage of having unusual ancestral names (back a few generations some Smiths enter in, but before that none of them are terribly common).  I first fell for genealogy in high school.  For a class project I had to sketch out a family tree, on paper.  I still prefer to look at them this way but you need a very large sheet.  The work was all done prior to computers (at least affordable ones).  My uncle had a copy of information my grandfather gathered and sent me a copy.  Then, when teaching full-time at Nashotah House, I’d occasionally make trips to Madison, Wisconsin to use the resources at the university library.  I wrote letters, met distant relatives, on paper.  Or microfiche.

About three years back, when my daughter was home for the holidays, we got to talking about family.  I’d searched for years for my maternal great-grandfather’s wife.  She died young and nobody in the family even knew her name.  While chatting, I logged in and was surprised to find that by using Find A Grave, I could quickly answer that question.  I’d been seeking that answer for decades, and there it was.  By that time I’d graduated to Reunion software.  The problem is, you have to keep rebuying it every time computer systems reach a certain upgrade-level.  We’ve purchased it at least three times, which seems predatory to me.  Time to put it all on paper again!  In any case, while reading about German immigration recently, I got curious.  I’d found that same great-grandfather’s parents’ names, but could go no further back without going to Germany.

I’m astonished at the work the Mormons have been doing behind the scenes for the past several years.  In seconds I was able, without paying, to get my ancestry back four generations further than ever before.  I know that Latter-day Saints have a theological motivation for what they do, but it is a real service for anyone interested in where they came from.  I’ve often heard that genealogy is a retiree’s habit.  I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to retire, but if I could, I could see how I would spend hours forgetting to eat or sleep, tracing roots, exploring rabbit holes.  I’ll need a very large sheet of paper, though.

Mired

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For someone who grew up with an Oscar Mayer jingle forever lodged his his brain, it took decades before I became curious about the surname.  I had always supposed it was a Germanic word for “mayor” but then, if so, mayors had to be very busy in the boudoir to make so many.  The reason I grew curious was that there are so many ways to spell it.  I’ve had people complain to me about having to spell their name every time, but I’ve run across “Meyer” spelled “Maier,” “Meyers,” “Mayer,” “Myers,” and many more.  Yes, I’m afraid you have to spell it.  (My wife’s surname is Stephenson and she has to spell it every single time.  For that matter, so do I.)  Why so many Mayers?  A little (very little) research turned up that it comes from old German for “manager”—thus possibly related to “mayor” and maybe even “major”—but that over time it came to mean “tenant,” basically a freeman farmer.  That’s why so many.

Photo by Erik 🖐 on Unsplash

Growing up in a small town, the very common surnames I encountered were “Smith,” “Jones,” and “Miller.”  My mother even married one of the Miller clan eventually.  “Smith” and its variants, derive from craftsmen of various sorts, such as “blacksmith.”  “Miller” is someone who works a mill.  The odd one out here is “Jones,” which derives from a prolific “John” somewhere way back when.  I’ve written before about how common (and widely variable) the name John is.  All these names share a “non-noble” background, it seems.  People of occupations that keep us going.  It made sense that “Meyer” was a name for farmers.

I grew up with a different, but not that uncommon (as the internet has taught me), surname.  Interestingly, all of my grandparental surnames were unusual, although one is compounded with “Schmidt,” or “Smith.”  I find names fascinating.  With so many of our species running around, unique forenames weren’t in large enough supply for us to stop there.  Which John are you?  John Johnson?  Okay, now I can place you.  I tend to struggle with transposed letters from time to time, making the variants of “Meyer” particularly difficult for me.  And that “y” acts like a vowel and sometimes becomes an “i.”  Or a “j” in German.  Cheeky.  We identify closely with our names.  They say something about us.  Thankfully we have other ways of distinguishing ourselves, otherwise we’d all just be lost in the crowd.