Baby name story: Julia Gillard

The mid-term elections may be over, but here’s one more election-related story for you.

Julia Gillard became Australia’s first female prime minister back on June 24, 2010. Minutes after the election results were announced, Papua New Guinea couple Singkau and Doreen Fuguto welcomed a baby girl. What did they name her? Julia Gillard.

Baby Julia Gillard wasn’t the first PNG baby to be named after an Australian prime minister, though. Back in 2008, then-prime minister Kevin Rudd paid a visit PNG. While he was there, Esau and Lina Kitgi welcomed a baby boy. They named him Kevin Rudd Junior.

Source: PNG newborn named Julia Gillard

Where did the baby name Thembi come from in 1971?

The Pharoah Sanders album "Thembi" (1971)
Pharoah Sanders album

The name Thembi first appeared in the U.S. baby name data in 1971:

  • 1973: 6 baby girls named Thembi
  • 1972: 7 baby girls named Thembi
  • 1971: 10 baby girls named Thembi [debut]
  • 1970: unlisted
  • 1969: unlisted

Why?

Because, in mid-1971, free-jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders released a song called “Thembi” on an album also called Thembi. The title track was “named in honor of his South African wife.”

The name Thembi (pronounced TEM-bee) is typically short for Zulu and Xhosa names like Thembisa, Thembisile and Thembekile.

Thembi came out several albums after Pharoah Sanders’ most successful album, Karma (1969), which was likely the thing that gave the baby name Karma a boost in 1970.

Pharoah Sanders himself was born in Arkansas in 1940 with the name Farrell Sanders:

Mr. Sanders assures me that the myths about his nickname “Pharoah” […] are false — it didn’t come from space traveler Sun Ra or from the music criticism of poet/playwright Amiri Baraka. “It was just a matter of paperwork. When I joined the union in New York City, they had a space for the artist’s name, so I just put [Pharoah] down.”

Because he altered the spelling of the Egyptian word pharaoh, it’s pretty easy to attribute the 1970s usage of the baby name Pharoah to him. (The traditional spelling, Pharaoh, didn’t emerge in the data until the end of the decade.)

Sources:

Where did the baby name Acquanetta come from?

Actress Burnu Acquanetta
Burnu Acquanetta

Back in the 1940s and early 1950s, an actress called Burnu Acquanetta — sometimes billed simply as “Acquanetta” — starred in a string of campy B-movies. She played an ape-woman in Captive Wild Woman (1943) and Jungle Woman (1944), a leopard-woman in Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946), and a native girl in Lost Continent (1951).

As a result, the rare name Acquanetta began popping up in the U.S. baby name data in the mid-1940s:

  • 1948: 12 baby girls named Acquanetta
  • 1947: 5 baby girls named Acquanetta
  • 1946: 13 baby girls named Acquanetta
  • 1945: 6 baby girls named Acquanetta
  • 1944: 6 baby girls named Acquanetta [debut]
  • 1943: unlisted
  • 1942: unlisted

At the height of the name’s popularity in the early 1950s, the variants Aquanetta and Acquanette popped up. Later the same decade, we see the very Aqua Net-like Aquanette.

So what’s the origin of “Acquanetta”?

A LIFE article from 1942 stated that both of Acquanetta’s parents were Native American and that her surname meant “laughing water.” Her 2004 obituary in The Independent says she claimed to be “part-Arapaho Indian and part-English aristocrat” and that her name means “burning fire, deep water.”

But a Jet article from the early ’50s tells us the truth: Burnu Acquanetta’s legal name was Mildred Davenport. Census records show that she was born in South Carolina and raised in Pennsylvania. (So was her brother, Horace Davenport, who became the first African-American judge in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.)

The stage names “Burnu” and “Acquanetta” aren’t genuine Native American names at all, then, but fanciful creations based on the words burn and aqua. They must have sounded exotic enough to pass as Native American back in the 1940s, though.

What are your thoughts on the name Acquanetta?

Sources:

Image: Clipping from the cover of Jet magazine (14 Feb. 1952)

Celine Dion named her baby after Nelson Mandela

Singer Céline Dion and husband René Angelil (in 2012)
Céline Dion and René Angelil

Celine Dion and her husband René Angelil welcomed twin boys named Eddy and Nelson a little more than a week ago. Here are the stories behind their names:

The name “Eddy” comes from Eddy Marnay, who produced the singer’s first five records. “He was like a father to her,” says Dion’s rep. “Eddy is a major influence in both Céline and René’s lives.”

Nelson is named after Nelson Mandela, whom Dion met two years ago while kicking off her world tour in South Africa. “René said that in just the few minutes they were able to spend with him, they were impressed by the human being he is,” says the rep.

“Céline and René want their children to be inspired by their names, because they were so inspired by these men,” the rep adds.

Celine and René’s eldest son, René-Charles, was born in 2001. (Charles was the name of Dion’s paternal grandfather.)

What are your thoughts on these names?

Source: Laudadio, Marisa and Sara Hammel. “Céline Dion Names Her Twins Eddy and Nelson.” People 29 Oct. 2010.
Image: Céline Dion René Angelil 2012 by Georges Biard under CC BY-SA 3.0.