While cleaning up and organizing one of the many boxes of old photos I happened across my late Uncle Ted’s baby book. He was born July 11, 1927 in Danbury, Connecticut according to his 1945 World War II draft card (he had just turned 18 years old.) Interesting to me, his last name was still spelled Bigalow at that time, so my grandmother Lillian Smith Bigelow’s influence on changing the spelling had not happened yet. I suspect the spelling change happened some time after she started her subscription to the Bigelow Society genealogical newsletter (several old copies were also in that trove of old, dusty boxes I found in the attic of 5 Bigelow Road.) Or maybe she happened across some Bigelow Tea at the grocery store. Who really knows what drove the change? I do remember clearly hearing my mother say that grandma changed the spelling because Bigalow was the ignorant spelling of the name. Whatever the catalyst, it’s lost to time now.
I had sent the baby book as well as a stack of glassine envelopes filled with old photos of Uncle Ted, Aunt Joyce and my young cousins from early, happy days in and around Port Henry and Westport, New York to my cousin Barbara Bigelow Stevenson, the eldest from that side of the family.
All this surname spelling nonsense got me to thinking about our family names in general. My Uncle Ted, or Ted Jr., was named after his father, Theodore Roosevelt Bigelow, born in August of 1898, who was named after the great president, Rough Rider, avid outdoorsman and ardent proponent of conservation. Roosevelt spent some time hunting and fishing in the Adirondacks and is pretty much responsible for the designation of the Adirondack Park in 1892. Still the largest National Park in the U.S.A. today. Evidently the Park’s formation was viewed as a positive by his parents, my great grandparents, Frank and Irene. That or they just ran out of ideas for names for babies. (They had 15 kids. Fifteen?!?!)
Uncle Ted’s middle name was Orrin, which was my grandmother’s (his mother) father’s first name. Orrin William Smith of Sullivan, Pennsylvania.
Today the name Theodore Bigelow is somewhere north of it’s fifth or maybe sixth generation. Like the Energizer Bunny, there’s no stopping the name in the family.
On my mother’s side, the O’Brien’s, pretty much stuck to Irish traditional naming patterns, which is the first son named for the father’s father. The second son named for the mother’s father. Third son named for the father. Fourth son named for the father’s eldest brother. It was this pattern that allowed me to discover the long lost O’Brien son that had traveled West in the late 1800s. Patrick Jr. headed out West with some money and photo portraits of his mom, Mary Starr O’Brien and dad, Patrick Henry O’Brien. Evidently the Cleveland, Ohio area was West enough for him where he became, wait for it, a cop. Seemingly another Irish tradition.
Then along comes my father, breaking all tradition. Galen Edward Bigelow, to whom this website and blog are dedicated too, used to introduce himself to strangers as the “Boy named Sue.” I know this because I personally witnessed it many times.
My grandmother must have loved the meaning of the name. Intelligence. After the famous Greek mathematician and scientist Claudius Galen, whose theory on illness was that it was an imbalance of the four humours: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. We have him to thank for bloodletting, which certainly was responsible for thinning the herd back in the day.
Reading through my Grandmother Lillian’s dairy from 1945 she repeatedly refers to my dad as “Gay”. “Gay did this.” or “Gay did that.” “Gay went off to the Army.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. :~)
But, man oh man, my dear father suffered for it his whole life.
And like Sue in the Johnny Cash song, Galen’s life was shaped by living up to, or in spite of, his name.
Galen Edward Bigelow 