From the Stacks: What’s in a name, and how do you say it?
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From the Stacks
What’s in a name, and how do you say it?
By Sarah Murphy
Greenwich Free Library
One of the bigger differences between public libraries and school libraries, where I did most of my work before coming to Greenwich, is the number of patrons who come to study genealogy. Like bird watching, studying your ancestry seems to be something you age into. As someone of a certain age, I freely confess to an obsession with the Merlin app (if you don’t know what this is, you’re either too young for birds, or too old to use apps), but until my recent vacation, I hadn’t quite entered my ancestry era.
I jumped at the chance to meet a second-cousin-once-removed in County Sligo, Ireland, and I knew the first question to ask: “How do you pronounce your surname?” Farry is the name on my maternal grandmother’s side of the family, and growing up I’d heard it pronounced two different ways. My grandmother, Mary, always pronounced the first syllable like “far,” as in distance. Some other relatives pronounced it as “fair.” Could Grandma simply not want to be known as Mary Fairy? Could she (or her brother Larry) have changed the pronunciation? Her parents had both come to Schenectady from Ireland; which would it have been in their accent?
As it turned out, neither pronunciation was correct, and Cousin Noel, born and bred in Sligo, appeared to wince as I posed the question. The a in Farry is closer to the a in “fat” than it is to “fair” or “far.” But here in the states, most of us can’t really make that short-a sound followed by an r. It’s the “merry, Mary, marry” linguistics debate: depending on where you are from, those words may or may not be homophones. Outside parts of Long Island and New Jersey, most US-born English speakers simply don’t have that pronunciation in their repertoire of sounds.
The discovery that I’d been pronouncing a family name incorrectly (or, to be charitable to regional accents, differently), was a bit of a blow, but to be honest, it was also thrilling. I couldn’t wait to recount the story to my family upon returning home. And that was only one of many stories I wanted to share, thanks to the generosity and hospitality of Noel, a relative I only found out about because a few years ago, my mother signed up for the subscription-based genealogy site, Ancestry. Noel had also joined Ancestry, and was fascinated by the number of relatives he had in and around Schenectady, NY. He wondered why they chose Schenectady and what had happened to them. He told me that he never heard his older relatives speak about the siblings who left. Likewise, my grandmother seemed to know almost nothing about her parents’ families back in Ireland. The subject, Noel and I agreed, was certainly too painful for any of them to want to share with the future generations. Those in our family who left Ireland did so over fifty years after the Great Hunger (known rather misguidedly in the States as the Irish Potato Famine). But severe poverty throughout Ireland was baked into the system where poor tenant farmers were at the mercy of wealthy (mostly English) landowners, and even decades after mass death and migration reduced the Irish population by millions, that poverty was pervasive and oppressive. Certainly enough to drive half a family to an industrial town like Schenectady. But because those painful stories weren’t shared, the family lore and knowledge was severed in two places thousands of miles apart.
I have serious reservations about giving credit to a for-profit tech company with controversial privacy practices for bringing me closer to my family and cultural history, but that is indeed what happened. And I’m far from alone. Longtime library volunteer and board member Cliff Oliver Mealy just returned from a family reunion in Virginia where he met hundreds of Mealy relatives who can trace their ancestors back to the 1740s. Cliff had been previously unaware of this Virginia lineage, which included James Mealy, a free man of color born in 1763 who served in the American Revolution. But he was contacted a while ago by a member of the extended Mealy clan who also happens to be a genealogist. How did he find you? I asked him. Ancestry, Cliff told me. Meeting the Mealys made Cliff rethink his relationship to his own name. I was always running from it, he said, it sounded small or weak. But not anymore. Nothing small about generations of free Black men and women living in Virginia. Nothing weak about a Revolutionary soldier.
I had been feeling pretty excited about my meeting with Noel and our visits to the graves of Irish relatives born in the late 19th-century, but after hearing Cliff’s story, I suddenly felt insufficiently knowledgeable about who came before them. Genealogy research, I had long observed from my perch behind the library desk, can get a bit competitive, and now I was finding out why. I may not be able to find centuries of records for my own heritage (there were, after all, an awful lot of fires), but my time with Noel Farry made it clear to me that there is so much more to learn. The stories of the past may have been too painful to tell at the time, but the connections we make today can be restorative.
It can feel overwhelming to start, and unlike bird watching, studying family history can stir up trauma or come with shock. It likely presents more questions than it answers. But for those who want to unearth those questions, the library is a place to start. In addition to the incredible resources that the Gill Local History Archive provides to those of you from Greenwich families, we also provide patrons with two different ways to access digital genealogical research. At home you can use your library card to login to Heritage Quest, and here at the library, you can get free access to Ancestry Library Edition. The library edition does lack some of the personalization that a paid subscription provides (you cannot create a family tree, for example), but there are learning resources only found in the library edition, so it is a great option for those beginning to research their family backgrounds, especially when used in tandem with a free personal account. Local artist, writer, and researcher Ken Perry is at the library several days a week, often found using the Ancestry Library Edition. Ken has agreed to host a workshop on using the resource at the library sometime in the fall. Be sure to check our website and newsletter for an announcement, coming soon.
Imagine using a free research tool that could, through twists and turns, dead ends and restarts lead you to a pleasant field on a narrow road not far from a view of the ocean. Imagine a kind new friend, a cousin, pointing to a partial rock fence and saying, there stood the house your great-grandfather grew up in. The journey to that place might start in the library. But no website can truly tell you how to correctly pronounce your own names or how to truly appreciate them. For that, you may have to meet in person and begin to restore lost connections.
Sarah Murphy is Director of the Greenwich Free Library. She is pictured at the site of the Farry House.
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More tomorrow!
I tried to listen to the radio program, but it kept glitching in and out. Not sure if the problem was on my end or yours, though. Our internet can be touchy here.