The Martyrdom of Saint Barbara by Lucas Cranach the Elder
I’ve never particularly liked my first name, Barbara. It seems old-fashioned (which it really is) and comes from the word “barbarian,” meaning foreign or strange (which actually fits me in many ways). Even St. Barbara isn’t exactly the kind of figure to inspire legends. She was beheaded by her father Dioscorus, who was then killed by a bolt of lightning. If that wasn’t bad enough, a shepherd who betrayed her was turned to stone, and all his sheep to locusts! Not what I’d consider terribly saintly. She’s the patron of architects, geologists, miners, sailors, and artillerymen — apparently because they all work with explosives (the lightning bolt association). She was also considered the patron saint of stonemasons, which is interesting given the colonial Bigham claim to fame as grave stone carvers.
But the name Barbara Bigham has one thing going for it: it’s not extremely common. Google “James Bigham” and you get 19,700 hits; Google “Barbara Bigham” and you come up with a mere 2,220. From an Internet genealogical research point of view, less is definitely better. This became clear to me when I began researching the earliest Bighams in this country. Common names like Andrew, William, Samuel, and James kept cropping up repeatedly, but for different people. As I mention in the page about Andrew Bigham, there were at least four-to-five Andrew Bighams living in Mecklenburg County, N.C., in the mid- 1700s. A similar situation existed with the Samuel, William, and even Hugh Bighams.
Each generation of Bighams had several sons and it was no doubt the family tradition to give them the standard family names of Andrew, Samuel, William and Hugh. Granted, that’s not as bad as George Foreman naming all five of his sons George, but it makes it difficult for future generations to know which William Bigham signed a particular deed or even married a certain woman (who, chances are, was named Sarah, Agnes, or Elizabeth).
Eventually, I got lucky with my branch of the Bigham family, since the same name was never repeated — at least for the male line. William was followed by Hugh Braly, who apparently ran out of ‘regular’ names by the time he got to his 10th child, my great-great-grandfather, who acquired the unusual and often misspelled name of Leonidas.
Leonidas’ first son was named Franklin Monroe, a nicely atypical moniker. His second son, however, was born six months after his father joined the 41st Mississippi Infantry to fight for the Confederacy. He was only 14 months old when his father died at Chickamauga, possibly never having seen his second child. Perhaps if Leonidas had been home to name his boy, he would have continued the new Bigham tradition of giving their children less common names. Instead, he was named William.
My great-grandfather was Franklin Monroe, who helped future family historians by naming his children Percy Eldon, Roy Starks (my grandfather), Hughey, Myrtle, and Millie. When you come across one of those names on a document, you don’t have to wonder whether it’s the RIGHT one.
When it comes to unusual names, though, a different branch of my family tree really takes the prize. If I follow my father’s father’s mother’s line back from the Baxters to the Gobers, and then to the Burns and the Scurlocks, I find the most delightfully and uniquely named “Men Repent Scurlock” among my ancestors. Try Googling THAT and you’ll see the advantages to an unusual name!
All this gives me a new appreciation for my name of Barbara. Not common enough to be a plain Jane, but not bizarre enough to cause people to chuckle. Just right.
