There's Something About Edna

Rotograph postcards, 1905, courtesy of Missiles & Rockets

Sixty-six years of Mary*

Heavy Metal Band name taxonomy by Doogie Horner.

I like lists. I also like unusual, historical, stupid, and exotic names. So it was with some interest  I noted that Social Security released their annual list of popular baby names (Jacob, Isabella). The site provides some good browsing. For instance, I didn't know that Mary was the top girl's name from 1880 (first searchable year) through 1946? Sixty-six years of Mary! Mary was then displaced by Linda for 7 anomalous years before—miraculously— she returned to number one for another 9 years. Wow, there's something about Mary, indeed.

Like many people I've wondered about the disappearance of names like Ethel, Bertha, Mildred, Ida, et al. "Old fashioned" names, period names— names that cannot help but seem tied to another time and place. How did they drop off the list? What social/cultural vagaries came into play to annihilate names that were common and popular. Was it Hollywood and the rise of "movie stars" like Gloria Swanson, Louise Brooks, Joan Crawford that made Bessie, Ada, and Viola seem so last century? What about a name like Lisa— where did that come from? Its a part of today's  standard roster of go-to names. It was number one several years in the early sixties, yet it wasn't even on the top 1000 list in say, 1930. There were Pearlines, Glennas, Floys, and Wandas, but not one Lisa.

Some "old fashioned" names have enjoyed a healthy resurgence. Emma has been going strong for years now, and I am personally familiar with some young Ivy, Hazel, Pearl and Mabels. (I personally hope that Britney, Brittany, Katelynne, Kaylee and all their unique-ified transcriptions do not resurface a 100 years from now as quaint, unusual revivals.)

When speaking of old fashioned, unusual, historical or stupid names, one has to turn to my favorite repository of onomastic pyrotechnics: Colonial New England. They drew upon a whole spectrum of fire, brimstone, saintly virtues, and obscure Old Testament references and came out with, what is to me, endlessly fascinating naming practices. If anyone is as interested as I am in early New England oddities I recommend Vast Public Indifference, a blog of gravestones and naming run by a Harvard grad student (several of the names below are from that blog). Also, Curiosities of Puritan nomenclature (1897) by Charles Wareing Endell Bardsley is a must for gaining knowledge about the Hope-stills and Fly-fornications of the past. And dont miss the amazing Farber Gravestone Collection.

Miss Asenath Tinkham
Obed Abbott
Ichabod Swaddle
Titus Frisbie
Eliphalet Gray
Titus and Eliphalet were Revolutionary War veterans from Brandford, CT
Mephibosheth "Fib" Adams
Miss Lobelia Scroggins

The Lobelia is also called pukeweed, and it represents malevolence in the Victorian language of flowers

Epaphroditus Ransom

(March 24, 1798– November 11, 1859) seventh Governor of Michigan

Onesiphorus Tileston
Miss Hazelelponi Willix
Miss Cozbi Hayden

Cozbi was the daughter of a Midianite king, and the name represents voluptuousnes and deceitfulness. There is seemingly incontrovertible evidence that early New Englanders were bible-obsessed but not always bible-literate.Either children were bestowed "cruel" names on purpose or parents were not always sticklers for getting the backstory.

Genubath Strong
Bezer Hill

"was killed by the upsetting of a cart"

Jehosheba Taft
Thurlow Weed
(November 15, 1797 – November 22, 1882) a New York newspaper publisher, politician, and party boss

* This post got deleted somehow and this second edition, rewritten, basically covers earlier territory.

Highlights from the Collection*

 

*A sporadic series of posts focusing upon some object or series chosen from amongst the piles in my apartment. A spotlight thrown on things curious, or engaging in their unremarkableness.

the color fever *

Léon Gimpel, Balloon show at the Grand Palais, 1907

Lt Col. Mervyn O'Gorman, his daughter Christina at Lulworth Cove, 1913
O'Gorman was also a pioneering aviator, motorist and Superintendent of the Royal Balloon Factory

Mrs. Benjamin F. Russell, Lady in a greenhouse, 1910
I cant find any further information about Mrs. Benjamin F. Russell
although she has some other unusual autochromes out there.

Alfred Stieglitz, his niece Flora Stieglitz Straus, ca 1915

Charles Zoller, Arnett YMCA interior, ca 1916

Charles Spaeth, woman in silk robe, ca 1915

Arnold Genthe, 1915

Jean-Baptiste-Tournassoud, girl in a hammock, 1909

Heinrich Kuhn (above three) ca 1910

Anonymous, ca 1915

Autochrome, invented by the Lumiere brothers, French moving picture pioneers, was the first industrial process for color reproduction. Thus true color images became next in the line of French landmark inventions beside the daguerreotype and, come to think of it, photography itself. On June 10, 1907 the autochrome became commercially available after Messrs. Lumiere made the first public demonstration. I believe it remained the only color process until the arrival of Kodachrome in 1935.

It was a rather complicated affair to create autochrome plates, and hence, expensive.

"Microscopic potato starch grains were separated into batches, dyed red, green and violet, mixed together and spread over a glass plate coated with a sticky varnish. Next, carbon black (charcoal powder) was spread over the plate to fill in any gaps between the colored starch grains. A roller submitted the plate to a pressure of five tons per square centimetre in order to spread the grains and flatten them out. Finally, the plate was coated with a panchromatic photographic emulsion....A summer landscape taken in the midday sun, required at least a one second exposure. In cloudy weather, this could be increased to as much as ten seconds or more. Spontaneous ‘snapshot’ photography was out of the question, and the use of a tripod was essential.”—The Royal Photographic Society

Professional photographers and artists were agape and took to autochrome's pointillist effects, which were in perfect step with the romanticized Pictorialist art sensibilities of the day. (Upper middle class hobbyists took to it too, producing floral still lifes ad nauseum.)//

Autochrome colors flicker between hazy indeterminancy and saturated flashes. The images have such an ethereal almost fleeting quality about them, like the partial recollection of a dream. The fugitive aspect is paradoxical of course since these images have been fixed, however precariously, for a hundred years...

...........................................

further reading:

Steven Kasher gallery
photographymuseum.org
Flickr set
Read about the amazing Albert Kahn collection of some 72,000 autochrome plates—
part of his wildly ambitious attempt at an ethnographic "archive of the planet."

* “It’s the greatest thing that ever happened to photography,” Alvin Langdon Coburn told Alfred Stieglitz in 1907, "I have the color fever badly."
“Soon the world will be color-mad," said Stieglitz.