Baby Name: Mabelle

Have any 20th-century Uldines in your family tree? If so, there’s a good chance that your Uldine was named after pint-sized preacher Uldine Mabelle Utley.

Uldine Utley was born in Oklahoma in 1912, spent much of her youth in Colorado, and then moved with her family to California — where she first encountered Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, in 1921. Not long after witnessing Aimee preach, Uldine decided to begin her own preaching career.

By the mid-1920s, Uldine was one of America’s best-known child evangelists. She drew a crowd of 14,000 when she preached at Madison Square Garden at the age of 14, for instance. She even put out her own monthly magazine called Petals from the Rose of Sharon.

And when Uldine Utley was most popular — from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s — usage of the rare baby name Uldine was at its highest, according to data from both the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Social Security Death Index (SSDI).

At least four of these babies, including Uldine Utley Parnell (b. 1921, South Carolina) and Uldine Utley Peters (b. 1930, West Virginia), were given “Uldine Utley” as a first-middle pairing.

The original Uldine Utley kept up an intense preaching schedule until the end of 1936, when she suffered a nervous breakdown. She recovered temporarily, and even had a brief marriage, but spent most of the rest of her life in institutions or under family care.

Are you related to anyone named Uldine? What are your thoughts on the name? Any guesses about the name’s derivation?

Sources:

• Robinson, Thomas A. ““Out of the Mouths of Babes”: Pentecostalism and Girl Evangelists in the Flapper Era.” Assemblies of God Heritage (annual edition) 2013: 37-45.
• Uldine Utley – Wikipedia
• FamilySearch.org

Image: Petals from the Rose of Sharon (pdf), November 1926.