Records, Compulsions, and Names.

This summer I put myself up to a new obsession after I went to a Stake youth activity as a chaperone.  The purpose of the activity was to teach the teens how to look up their family tree, record stories and other interesting information about the aforementioned tree members, or transcribe the data off old hand-written legal documents.  

So anyway, I came home, and thought, "Self, if I am going to promote this to the local teens, I'm going to need to know how this works."  So I went to familysearch.org, installed the indexing software, and downloaded my first batch.  It was enlistment records from the 1890s in Tennessee.  Pretty easy!  So I downloaded another batch, with 1940 census records from New York, then 1920s Marriage licenses from Texas, then Ship logs from Germany in 1860, then looked at the clock and it was 1am.  Sheesh!

I did that again each night that week from about 10pm to 1am, and really had a great time with it.  I indexed like 800 records that week, felt very fulfilled, and then recognized my addiction.  Wow.  But hey, I contributed several pages of Census transcriptions to the effort, and along with other addicts, we digitized at a record pace! (News item posted 8/3/2012).

How does that happen?  As discussed earlier, Jen will attest that when I get into something, I'm all in and am tough to distract from it until I get it out of my system.  So recognizing it wasn't going to be feasible to stay up that late every night as an indexer, and recognizing that I have a family, a job, and other night chores to do, I cut back to just doing the occasional batch on Sundays or evenings.  

Well, a recent Sunday batch I downloaded was a collection of marriage records from the Bahamas from the 1920s.  Sounds like a nice, tropical way to enjoy a Sunday evening, eh?

I found a very interesting phenomena in those names.  The mens' names were very standard and traditional for the most part, but the women's names?  They were... unique!  I couldn't help but write a few down:

Females:

Advilda 

Julelah 

Jerolene 

Corine 

Hazel Eloise 

Elletta 

Eldarado 

Ulena 

Manuella 

Bienziel 

Grendlin

Algertha 

I had three thoughts.
1) This reminded me of my friend Bridget's numerous blog entries about names of children that are unique, made up, or sometimes obnoxious.  If you're into that, her blog is a great reference point.
2) It makes me think that some of these names are probably unfortunate mistakes.  Like Jerolene might have been meant as Geraldine, or Eldarado seems to have been aiming at El Dorado (still, is that a name?).  Ulena might have been Elena or Alaina.  I think Grendlin was supposed to be Gwendolyn, but was lost in transcription.  Algertha?  Maybe Agatha?
3) A couple of months ago I was watched the 1967 version of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd where a farm hand was signing on and gave his name as "Cain", with the explanation that his mom meant to name him Abel, but accidentally got the Biblical story wrong!

Whatever the case, I appreciate indexing so much more now because I get to contribute to the body of digital knowledge, and get to come across interesting information that will help others tell their family story, like when I indexed a man named Jenesis (perhaps homage to Genesis?) on one record.