Interesting experience...

[krosp.livejournal.com]

Hmmm this is all a bit airy fairy so I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to explain it properly so please bear with me :)

Today I walked through a cemetery, looking at the names on the headstones. It was a really nice cemetery with lots of huge shady trees and just a very serene place to take a walk.

Somehow I just got struck with this sense of acceptance of most names. The people in that cemetery would have been mostly born in between 1850 and 1920, I would say, with some earlier and later.

Somehow, when I wasn't imagining the name on a child or person in 2010, but was just thinking of this unknown dead person from long ago, every name seemed nice and fresh. I guess because a cemetery is a very respectful place, you don't look down on any name but by paying your respects, you see the name in a more positive light.

I still had preferences for names I like more or less than others, but I guess I thought of these people as babies, children, adults and elderly people, as well as deceased people, and just realised that whether it was a common name at the time, or an uncommon name, whether it is still a common name now or whether it sounds "old fashioned", those names belonged to those people, and everyone knew them by those names. Naming trends come and go, but when the name belongs to a person none of that really matters.

Those are just my reflections from my walk in the cemetery.. sorry if I made no sense.
For those who are interested, here were some of the most common names I can remember seeing:
Ellen, Mary, William, Francis, John, James, Edith, Veronica, Alice, Annie, Elizabeth, Walter. Also Hector, Maurice, Vincent, Roy, Sarah, Laura, Michael, Dorothy, August, Augusta, Ivy, Violet, Hannah, Rose.