UNUSUAL FIRST NAMES
When expectant parents start considering names for their baby-to-be there are many avenues to search for ideas. In the last 20 or so years many unusual first names have appeared. In my case, both sets of my grandparents were very progressive with selecting very unusual first names for both my father and my mother.
My father, Mylen Elmer Schulte, was born March 29, 1923 in Detroit, Michigan. He was the second of three children that my paternal grandparents would have. While my father usually used his nickname, Monie, throughout life, his official name was indeed Mylen.
Mylen Elmer Schulte, 1923:
While I don't know for certain, I am pretty confident that this name was chosen as my grandfather had had a first cousin named Mylen who was born August 24, 1905 and who died on April 2, 1909. My grandfather would have been 10 years old at the time his cousin, Mylen, was born and perhaps he had had a fondness for him.
In a search on Google for the rarity of the first name Mylen for baby boys born in the US, I learned that there were 3.6 million babies born in the US in 2020. Only 1,267 of those babies were named Mylen.
That is certainly a very small portion.
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My mother, Eloris Harriett Kijak, was born July 5, 1925 in St. Joseph, Michigan. She was the third of four children that my maternal grandparents would have. She never had any nicknames that were used, and although her first name of Eloris was very often mispronounced, she always was quick to explain that her name was indeed Eloris (pronounced E LOR S).
My grandmother explained to me that when she was pregnant with my mother she had been reading a story about twin babies named Deloris and Eloris. She had determined then that if she was carrying twins those were the names she would use. When my mother was born my grandmother chose the more unusual of those names and my mother became Eloris.
Eloris Harriett Kijak, 1926:
In my research on the rarity of the female first name, Eloris, I learned something most interesting.
On the website www.names.org as well as the website for the social security administration, I learned that:
"Eloris is the 71,332nd most popular name of all time. From 1880 to 2019, the Social Security Administration has recorded TWELVE babies born with the first name Eloris in the United States."
Twelve babies in 139 years. Now that is certainly an unusual first name!
ADDENDUM:
Today, August 8th, my cousin commented on my above blog to inform me that she did some digging on-line and learned that of the 12 babies born in the US from 1880-2019 named Eloris, two of those babies were MALE.
After reading that I had to add this Addendum also including an interesting misconception on my father's first name. In 1996, just prior to my father's death, he was hospitalized in the same hospital where I worked in Administration. At the time, the hospital was a Catholic institution and there were still nuns working in various capacities. One of the elderly nuns was responsible for visiting the inpatients and praying with them if they so desired. As we were not Catholic it was indicated on my father's paperwork that our Lutheran minister would be visiting thus relieving her of that duty. However, she was very knowledgeable on all the names of those hospitalized. One day she stopped me in the hallway to just talk and asked me how I was doing. I told her I was fine but very worried about my father who was very ill in ICU. She frowned and said to me that "there is only one patient here in the hospital named Schulte and that is a woman with the first name Mylen". I smiled and told her that was actually a man's name and that it was my father.
Just two examples of the very unusual first names that both my parents had!
2 comments:
From a quick & dirty poke around Ancestry, I see that at least two of those twelve Elorises were MALE!
How interesting. That reminds me of the time that somebody thought my father's name was referring to a woman! I think this calls for an addendum to my post.
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