What's YOUR Name?

Just beyond a toddler, I was asked by a swimming instructor if I was ashamed of my name. Too young to understand the question but old enough to remember it six decades later, I have since been sensitive to the impact of the sound—"of the sound”—of a name. I had by then heard the children’s trick-rhyme “Shakespeare / Kick in the Rear.” But it would take until college to come across the Bard’s nominal contribution to my heritage.

Full fathom five thy father lies / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange / Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

Preferring the idea of “life knell” to its polar antipodes, I have made it my business to usher in the new instead of predicting the demise of its opposite. In either case, I think of my name not for what it might mean to others but for what it signals uniquely to me. Much like my ancestors’ thousand-thousand combinations of bone, wit, gut, flash, and outbreak, the name they eventually bestowed upon me at least flavors some of what I have made of their gifts.

There was Beatrice de Geneve who died in Geneva, Switzerland 700 years to the day ahead of my birth. Is that why, not knowing that fact until decades later, I moved to her namesake hometown when I was 19?

And Eleanor of Aquitaine. She married King Richard II of England to produce my great-great-times-a-million grandfather before Richard locked her up in a tower in Chamonix. Having last week celebrated my 45th anniversary with my wife Kari, whose only trip to Chamonix has been with me to see the Alps (and not stay over for life), I have so far not followed in that beloved ancestor's footprints.

Eleanor’s father returned from the Crusades with songs and stories he spread all over France. Guillame IX D'Aquitaine is considered one of the first Troubadours. Is that why I love music and story-telling?

Lady Godiva, infamous for a fantastic falsehood—it turns out she performed her social activism fully clothed!—is less known for the far more important stand she took against her cruel husband on behalf of his hapless renters. Have I been so bold in the causes I believe in?

All of us inherit an endless parade of ancestral traits known by any number of names. Exponential explosions are such that we need go back only seven generations—a mere century and a half—to amass 127 surnames. And that’s just on our mother’s side. From which of our progenitors have we received which traits, tendencies, and gifts?

Geneticists tell us it is theoretically possible that each of us possesses remnants of the genes of our ancestors from time immemorial. But randomness and the fact that for every generation, at least half of each parent's DNA is left on the cutting room floor conspire to monkey with the probability of an exhaustive inheritance. Most genes seep from our ancestral pool, while proclivities, talents, preferences, and traits—especially paternal names—can persist over time. While we might not inherit our physicality from our combined 254 “recent” ancestors equally, we do tend to pick up things from our parents and grandparents, whom we might have come to know along the way.

Yesterday, watching Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic, two dark-haired world number one and two tennis players compete in semifinal matches at the U.S. Open tennis championships, texting my brother Abe throughout, reminded me that our dark-haired father qualified to play in that same tournament 75 years ago. And while I inherited from Dad my love of that wonderful sport, I'm sure I haven't a fleck of his tennis DNA in my body. I do ponder on some of his other gifts. In addition to athlete, he went by a host of names in his 80-year life—painter, architect, city planner, dreamer—not to mention husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. His surname, then, changed only two generations earlier by a man whose father changed his own name a generation before that, is not the only name he passed along. Nor was my mother's surname—Cloward—sandwiched between my first and last all she bequeathed to me. She went by?singer,?actor,?beauty queen,?radio host, and teacher. (Care to guess which of those five names I never got round to wearing?) Other?names?my parents passed along from their parents and grandparents include?cobbler,?pole vaulter,?Pinkerton detective,?pony express rider, and?frontier settler, to name but a handful among dozens that have passed me right by as well (although I did learn to ride as a kid and managed to jump over my head before reaching my full height). Believing as I happen to that unlike DNA, trait secrets can persist across generations, I'm personally holding out for Grandpa Guillaume to whisper in my direction some of his classic storytelling chops.

When I think of all 254 surnames (256 if you count the two that were changed)—thanks mainly to siblings, whose diligence they inherited from our pioneer forbears and modern tools like?FamilySearch.org?and?Ancestry.com—I now know something about my eclectic?name pool. I expect that within and across it, random and recessive genes notwithstanding, you and I each have unique access to a pool of thousands of traits, ticks, gifts, and carefully honed skills to call upon when drawing strength and solidarity from all our folk.

What are?your?names?

Scott Knell is an American innovator, indirectionist, and author of the weekly LinkedIn column Say the Change. To read his personal and professional retrospective on Being and Becoming, visit his blog at?Indirections I Have Lived By.

? 2023 Scott Knell, all rights reserved.