Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 17, 1993 TAG: 9301190308
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
THE RECORD FOR NAMES? ODEAR, IT'S ALIEN
Do you suppose if Odear married Useless they'd name their child Surprise?It could have happened. Between 1912 and 1939, actual Virginians with those actual names were born or died.
A company hired to copy old state records onto computer disks has found an Ocean of such Wonderfull, Peachie, Gloryious names, along with some causes of death that would make you cry in your Sourbeer, make Maccaroni taste like Suet and put Vasoline in your Boston Lettuce - more of the true-life monikers).
"It's been a fascinating project," said Lynn Knoop of Cincinnati Bell Information Systems Inc., which has reduced 2.8 million birth and death certificates onto fewer than 30 optical disks for the Virginia Division of Vital Records.
Now in its final stages, the two-year, $2.2 million project has combined monotonous drudgery with the sublime and, occasionally, the disturbing.
"A girl that used to work here went in to look at her brother's birth certificate," said microfilming supervisor Jim Orum, "and found out he was illegitimate."
Better, perhaps, than finding a relative who fell from a tree, landed astride a lower limb and later died of gangrenous testicles, a fate met by one erstwhile Virginian.
It turns out death in the early part of the century was sometimes only an antacid away, "acute indigestion" being a fairly common cause listed at the time. Not to mention "paralysis of the insane" or infants smothered by sleeping parents while sharing a bed.
Other causes, fortunately, were more rare:
One man expired after his wife "gave him too many cold meals," said project office manager Libby Barker.
Another Virginian died by the seat of his pants, succumbing to an infected splinter after sitting on an upturned milk pail.
Family values suffered even in those days; one man was "found dead on whorehouse floor," and a father put his infant in the path of a locomotive.
A train also dispatched two unidentified hobos, who lost their heads while sitting atop a railroad car as it went through a tunnel.
And one character was "shot to death by Petter [sic] Underwood in a drunken row over a still tub and a mean woman."
One person's tragedy is someone else's comic relief; bits of offbeat history like those kept the CBIS team interested while grappling with their mammoth task.
The employees, 75 at the project's height last summer, logged about 310 million keystrokes as they typed information from the certificates into a computer.
Each document and anything attached to it also had to be microfilmed - one page at a time - then all the film was checked for image quality, and every image had to be individually scanned and stored in the computer.
The result, finished now except for some last-minute corrections, will let state workers grab birth and death certificates from 1912 (the first year they were recorded) to 1939 almost instantaneously via computer instead of hoisting moldy old volumes off towering bookshelves.
Getting to that point involved no small amount of sleuthing on the part of the CBIS data loggers. Many of the old birth certificates were written out by midwives who had creative command of the alphabet.
One baby appeared to have been born someplace called Justi Easti Mario; a long study of the handwriting finally deciphered the birthplace as "just east, off Main." That entry won an in-house CBIS contest for strangeness.
There were plenty of other odd place-names, even when the handwriting was good. Ever hear of Nagyrad Gumont Harad? Sounds like Many of the old birth certificates were written out by midwives who had creative command of the alphabet. Klingon; it's Hungarian.
It took experts from the Virginia State Library and Archives and the University of Richmond Library, plus an employee who knew Russian, to help decipher entries like that.
"There were foreign countries that don't even exist anymore," Knoop said. "You have to have a real sense of political awareness."
Never far away was the sensation that the spidery old handwriting, the yellow crinkled paper blipping happily onto crisp computer disks, represented life after life, story after story.
"One birth certificate had been sent in late, and the mother wrote that it was because she couldn't afford the $25 to have the baby delivered, so she delivered the baby herself," Knoop said.
"One woman was in Roanoke visiting her sister and apparently had some kind of nervous breakdown. While they were driving downtown, she shot her husband and her dog," Barker said.
Barker also found a birth certificate that had 10 or 12 siblings recorded on the back, each born in a different town. "They were all cotton-mill places," she said, "so you could see where the family had moved from mill to mill to mill looking for work."
In the 1920s, car accidents began cropping up on death certificates for the first time. Groups of death records from the same date marked disasters - a flu epidemic around 1918 or 1919, naval accidents in Norfolk around the time of World War I.
All tales easily imagined. But when it came to peoples' names, the explanation often was anybody's guess.
"There were twins born on George Washington's Birthday: one named Martha, one named George," Knoop said.
"You could tell which president was in office by looking at the names," Barker said. "There were lots of Woodrow Wilsons, Theodore Roosevelts, Franklin Delanos."
"Didn't see any Nixons," added Terry M. Lee, project manager.
"But we did see lots of Robert E. Lees. And no Ulysses Grants at all," Barker said.
No, instead of honoring Union generals, Virginians preferred to christen their young Nicey Horsie, Molegold, Comfort Care or even Turnipseed, all legal names from the records.
Access to all that nomenclature should have been a gold mine for Terry Lee; he and his wife will be filling out a birth certificate of their own when their baby is born in the next few weeks. Sunbeam Lee? Ammonia Lee? How about the elegantly simple Ogg Lee?
"No - Michelle Victoria," Lee said. "It's not an unusual name. It wouldn't be any good, would it?"
Not half as good as Money Maker. Or Grenade. Or Helium. Or Fishback.
\ UNIQUE NAMES
Unique names Some other unusual names of Virginians discovered by researchers who computerized the state's birth and death records:
Amber City Easter
Italy May
Navel
Cigarette
New Fang
Salts
Moles
Alien
Angie Awkward
Sterling Silver
Crystal Sandra Leare (say it out loud, fast)