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.

Comments

[shockfactor.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this! My husband and I walk our dog through a cemetery every day (there's no where else to walk where we live), and I've been struck by the same perspective. They're ALL beautiful when you think of them attached to a person, in their own time...and then naming becomes much less about what's "in" (or trying to avoid what's trendy) and more about finding something that feels right for the personality you're growing.

They're all timeless, when it comes down to it! And I don't think it was airy at all - I think it's beautiful.

[waitingonsunday.livejournal.com]

Very nicely put. When I'm in a graveyard, I have a tendency to look at the names and envision an elderly person. Of course, a glance at the dates show that some of them never made it that far in life, but either way, I like to go back and consciously imagine their parents proudly announcing their names when they were newborns, or picture them as cute kids running around with these names that the older generation would never have used, or think of newlyweds grinning and introducing themselves for the first time as Annie and Francis Walker, instead of Francis Walker and Annie Johnson. I think you put it much better than I could have, but as you said, it's nice to picture them as people instead of simply seeing a grave marked with Dorothy and thinking of her simply as part of a trend of a hundred years ago.

[duckduckcaboose.livejournal.com]

I think it's kind of a similar process to how most of us here approach naming in general. We don't just think of babies as tiny babies, but as people who will grow into adults and have kids and grandkids, etc. And I know I am definitely more accepting of people who list weird family names as opposed to weird "I just like them" names because there's already some preconception of this important person when it comes to family names and it's a respect thing.

[krosp.livejournal.com]

Thanks :) Great to know that someone else feels the same way. It made me feel a lot more comfortable with choosing names somehow.

[krosp.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I totally agree. Glad to know I'm not the only one who is fascinated by names on graves :)

[krosp.livejournal.com]

Yeah I think you're right, I mean I think of all ages on a name anyway, but when I imagine it it's an imaginary hypothetical person, whereas in a cemetery I *know* that they were real if that makes sense.. so it's the same as what I'd already do but kind of stronger.