The Names We Kept and the Ancestors We Chased

In the late summer of 1997 a form letter arrived at a house in Climax, Michigan, addressed to Mary Collver. It called her a proud bearer of the name and told her she was listed. She had been dead eighteen months. Printed in the corner was the merge number: 669083.

This episode takes that letter as a specimen, and asks what separates the name a family keeps from the ancestors it chases. Part one reads the Collver given names generation by generation, out of the register at the back of the book: John, Joshua, Samuel, Gershom; then Jabez, a name built on the Hebrew word for pain; then Darius and Calista out of the schoolbook; then the mother’s maiden surname carried forward as a monument; then John Milton, for the poet; and at last Albert Bernard, three times over. Sacred, then national, then personal.

Part two follows the other half — the waves of American genealogy, from the hereditary societies of 1889 to 1897, through the post-war silence, to the inversion that Roots and the Bicentennial worked on the whole enterprise. And it makes a confession: the 1912 Colonial Dames catalog and the DAR record copies in this project’s own footnotes are artifacts of the first impulse, put to the service of the second.

Text, images and full notes at history.collver.biz.