Introduction
When I had a hospital visit last week
the nurse looked at her schedule and said, “Hello, Mr. Alan.” I quickly
realized that she had mistaken my first name for my last name, so I corrected
her and we had a brief conversation about how my first name and last name could
be interchangeable. But this got me thinking about the subject of names and how
they change over time.
While the most common error that people
make with my name is misspelling “Russell” by only having a single “s” or a
single “l”, the name itself has not gone through too many spelling changes
since it came into being a millennium ago. The original was spelled “Roussel”
or “Rozel” in Normandy, France, but by the time family members went to England
in 1066 under William the Conqueror, the spelling got anglicized into its
current form. (*1)
The
Pierpont Name
But there is a different story with my
mother’s maiden name, Pierpont, and that’s what I’d like to explore in more
detail here.
The original family name was “de
Pierrepont” and was from Normandy, France in the late 900s. The “de” is from a
Latin preposition which means “down, from, down from, off or concerning,” and “Pierrepont”
has the meaning of “stone bridge” (Pierre means stone and pont means bridge),
because there was a stone bridge in front of the family castle. So the name
literally meant “from the stone bridge.”
Family members still living in France (my
distant cousins, including a few with whom I am friends in Facebook), continue
to have this last name. But a grandson of the original de Pierrepont went to
England as part of the army of William the Conqueror. And it wasn’t long after
that the family dropped the “de” part of the name, simply becoming “Pierrepont”.
The family manor, Holme Pierrepont, was established in the 1200s (*2).
During the next 400 years that the
family was in England, the Pierrepont spelling continued to dominate (probably
because they were minor royalty). However, there were a few variations,
including “Pierrepoint” (adding an “i”), “Perpoint” (*3) and “Perpoynt”. The
name still persists in England to this day, the most recent “famous” family
member being Albert Pierrepoint who was a hangman of renown (*4).
Around 1631, John Pierrepont came to
America as part of the Great Migration. Early records mention the name as “Peirpoint”
or even “Pearepoint”, but he changed his name to “Pierpont” and this is the
spelling of the name that he passed along to his children (*5). This is the
spelling that persisted in the US, but with one exception. In the late 1700s,
one of the great-grandsons of John, Hezekiah Beers Pierpont, decided to adopt
the original French spelling (minus the “de”) and changed his surname to
Pierrepont (*6). This name can now be found in Brooklyn, NY, both in a street
name and a prominent building. There are also a number of Pierpoint families in
the US, but most of these are descendants of Henry Perpoynt who settled in the
Maryland/Virginia area. The relationship between Henry and the New England Pierponts
has not yet been determined (*7).
How Name Changes Happen
We now live in a very
automated, computer-centric age. Your name is registered at birth and thus
appears in several different government computer systems. The exact spelling is
registered and it cannot be easily changed. Doing so is a time-consuming process
and involves one of a number of different court scenarios (marriage, adoption,
etc.). Whether going to school, getting a driver’s license, getting
prescriptions filled, or a host of other daily activities, you must spell your
name for their computer system – changing your name, even if in the process of
a female getting married, is a complicated thing.
Thus, it’s difficult for
those of us living in today’s society to consider what it was like before this
automation. But for much of history, even of just the last millennium which we
are considering here, things were much different. We are used to a near 100%
literacy rate in the US. But the earliest figures I can find for the period in
question is that the literacy rate in England in 1475 was only 5% (*8). With so
few people being able to read/write, most communication would have been oral
and anything written would not only have been “long hand,” but would have been
based on what the individual said to the person keeping the records and how
they were heard.
The first “automation”
would have been the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg around this
same time (1455) (*9). But few people would have been able to read it. And very
few of these books were actually produced – only about 180 copies which took
three years to print.
By the time the Pierpont
family came to America, literacy in England was about 50%, and the Pierpont
family, being of minor aristocracy, were almost certainly able to read and
write. But everything was still hand-written. Also, the process of changing
your name would have been as simple as deciding to change it, calling yourself
by the new name, and using it whenever appropriate. Of course, there were still
many processes which would have been others writing down what you said, so a
variety of misspellings were apt to result. Also, there would have continued to
be misinterpretations based on people trying to read what had been written in
cursive.
Going from cursive
writing to typing in a standard font would take another couple hundred years. It
was not until the latter part of the 1800s that commercial typewriters came
into use (*10), and they were not standardized until the early 1900s (roughly
100 years ago). It was only then that the problem of misinterpretation could be
addressed.
However, there were still
many processes where typing was not viable, one of them being the process of
taking the census every ten years. Here, the census taker knocked on the door,
usually talking to the wife (who would be home during the day), asking her
questions and recording her answers (*11). He/she was not allowed to presume
that she could read/write (even though the literacy rate was up to 80% by
1880), but had to continue to deal with the misinterpretations that could come –
both by the wife’s interpretation of what the census taker was asking, and by
his interpretation of what her answer was.
Thus, name changes came
into being for a number of reasons. Sometimes is was in order to
simplify/Americanize, like John Pierrepont shorting his name to Pierpont. Sometimes
it was deliberate, like Hezekiah Pierpont wanting to restore the original French
Pierrepont. Sometimes it was a mistake in recording by a census taker or
recorder of a baptism and the revised name “stuck.” And since there were no
computer systems to worry about back then, or government procedures to be
followed, there was no “red tape” involved in making the name change.
I’ve run across my fair
share of name changes, both in first and last names, during my genealogical
research. One of the most interesting was when I was looking for information on
one of my father’s cousins. Her name was Juanita but when I eventually found
her birth records it was recorded as “Wanita” – based on how the name sounded,
but by someone who was totally unfamiliar with pronunciation of the name. This
is just one more of the roadblocks that we deal with in genealogical research.
Footnotes:
*1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Russell
gives the background on the area and manor near Dorset which bears this name.
The name dates back to around the year 1200 when John Russell was a knight
under Richard I. However, note that the original granting of the land (written
in Latin) spelled the name “Russel” but the English translation spells it “Russell”.
*2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holme_Pierrepont
gives some of the history of the area where the Pierrepont family settled in
the 1200s.
*3 – The History of the Worthies of
England, Volume 2, p. 215, Thomas Fuller and John Nichols, (available on
Google books)
*4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Pierrepoint.
Albert (1905-1992), when he retired in 1956, was officially recognized as “the
most efficient executioner in British history.” I’m not sure that I would want
to have that job, but he did and was evidently very good at it.
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