> A couple of years ago, I read "Inheriting the > Revolution - The First > Generation of Americans" by Joyce Appleby, Harvard > University Press, > 2000.....and learned of the revivalist meetings in > the early/mid. > 1800s.....one of the preachers was Lorenzo Dow. I > think he may have been > responsible for many boys being named Lorenzo, > including possibly my > grandfather's middle name. There seem to have been > many named for DeWitt > Clinton too......I wonder if there is also a famous > Perez out there > somewhere?? > > Dianne Dianne, you are absolutely right, there were a great many children named for Lorenzo Dow. In the Genferret's limited experience this is true especially in the south, where Lorenzo Dow, though born in CT, did his preaching. There was apparently also a Lorenzo Dow's Medicinal Syrup, which cured, it was averred, a great many ailments, and who knows how that may have figured in. Lorenzo Dow was born in 1777, and so before the highly popular novel _The Monk_(1796) which featured a Lorenzo. [The Oxford Companion to English Literature says of _The Monk_ "The mixture of the supernatural, the horrible, and the indecent makes the book unreadable today." The Genferret, who was only recently scanning the front pages of the tabloids at the grocery checkout can only wonder.] There were other Lorenzos in other gothic novels, but the Genferret suspects that Lorenzo Dow's name may have come from Shakespeare. Lorenzo, in _The Merchant of Venice_ is the Christian who marries the Jew Shylock's daughter, for which the daughter Jessica is disinherited. The Genferret, whose sleep patterns have been disrupted by this irksome question, has begun scrolling through names on a MA VR CD, and while not yet out of the A's and already growing restive, the Genferret finds there were instances of names like Lorenzo (including a Lorenzo Dow), Fernando, Alonzo, Orlando, Alphonso and others. These all seem to date from the very late 1700s, rarely, to much more commonly the 1820s-1840s. There are some earlier in the 1800s and some later, but the bulge seems to come in the 20s through 40s, at least in the A surnames. This, given a certain lag-time for the vogue to reach America and catch on, would correspond well with the gothic novel fad. The Genferret though is cautious not to fall into the human error of _post hoc ergo propter hoc_ despite the delicious prospect that the sons and daughters of the pious pilgrims were reading this lurid, salacious sensationalist literature and naming their spawn for characters in these novels. It seems true that so far all these names belonged to the good guys in the novels, and it may be that the novels were read for moral edification, much like the diet of moral exempla brought to us by the network news. But I digress. Another good point you make Dianna is that in the early 1800s many children were named for once famous people now generally forgotten. For instance, along with the George Washingtons and John Wesleys were such as Harriet Newell, a young wife and said to be first female missionary from this country to another who, as is found on one website, "for the love of Christ and immortal souls, left the bosom of her friends and found an early grave in a land of strangers." A Google search will turn up page after page of Harriet Newells from the mid 1800s, presumably named by tearful young mothers who never anticipated the tears of frustration their descendants would shed trying to figure out how they are related to the Newell family. Another example that came up somewhere recently is Albigence Waldo, who was a doctor at Valley Forge and for whom many boys were named. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com