Baby name story: Nylic

New York Life Insurance Company illustration

Around the turn of the 20th century, Marshall and Ruby Bland of Milledgeville, Georgia, welcomed a total of four children — three girls and one boy. Their names were…

  • Elizabeth, or “Bessie” (born in 1895)
  • Nylic (b. 1898)
  • Lucie (b. 1900)
  • Marshall, Jr. (b. 1902)

How did their second daughter come to have the unusual name Nylic?

It was inspired by her father’s occupation: Marshall Bland was a local representative for the New York Life Insurance Company, also known by the acronym NYLIC.

And Nylic Bland’s business-based name ended up coming in handy several years later.

The Bland family attended St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, which had been damaged during the Civil War (specifically, during Sherman‘s March to the Sea in 1864).

In 1909, the congregation began raising funds to replace the original organ (into the pipes of which Union soldiers had poured molasses 45 years earlier).

Eleven-year-old Nylic took it upon herself to write to businessman George W. Perkins — who’d been the vice-president of NYLIC around the time she was born — to ask if he could make a contribution. In response, she received a telegram that stated: “Buy the organ and send the bill to me.”

Sources:

Image: Clipping from the New-York Life Insurance Company Annual Report (1907)

[Latest update: Nov. 2024]

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