Some names from New Orleans

beignet, food, new orleans
Beignets at Café Beignet

My husband and I hung out in New Orleans for about 48 hours in mid-December. It rained almost the entire time, but we still managed to get out and spot a few interesting names!

First, an unexpected food name: Beignet (pron. ben-YAY), which literally means “bump” in French. In terms of food, it’s fried dough with sugar on top. In terms of names, though, it’s been bestowed as a middle at least three times, according to the records I’ve seen. These human Beignets were all girls born in the ’80s and ’90s in Texas and Oklahoma.

We briefly visited the New Orleans Jazz and Jean Lafitte National Historical Parks, where we learned about people like…

  • Fate Marable, African American jazz pianist/bandleader (“Fate” could be short for Lafayette)
  • Cloaner Smith, African American quilter
  • Mrs. Louisianaise Daigle, Cajun healer

We also learned about various locations, including Atchafalaya.

Speaking of locations…while wandering around the city, we spotted ghost signs for Antoine’s Restaurant (which I mentioned in the Caresse post) and Uneeda Biscuits (I discovered the name “Uneeda” on a trip to Kansas City):

uneeda, new orleans, baby name

Aboard the Steamboat Natchez we noticed that the two boilers are named Thelma and Louise.

And finally, how about the name “New Orleans” itself? In the records I found dozens, including New Orleans Taylor, a 13-year-old girl living with her family in Louisiana at the time of the 1930 U.S. Census:

new orleans taylor, 1930, census

[Want more travel names? See my posts on Alaska, the Czech Republic, the Grand Canyon, and Hawaii.]

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