Where did the baby name Arcilia come from in 1942?

The baby name Arcilia popped up in the U.S. baby name data several times during the 1940s and ’50s, starting in 1942:

  • 1944: unlisted
  • 1943: unlisted
  • 1942: 7 baby girls named Arcilia [debut]
    • 5 born in Texas specifically
  • 1941: unlisted
  • 1940: unlisted

I think this 1942 debut may be attributable to a 6-year-old girl named Arcilia Mora from El Paso, Texas.

In January of 1942, the El Paso Herald-Post ran a photo of Arcilia, along with an article about how she’d been struck with polio in August of 1941. (“Little Arcilia, with her curly hair and her bright eyes and her smile, was a pathetic and stilled figure.”)

Following her diagnosis, she was put in an iron lung for a month and spoon-fed (she could swallow, but not chew). After that, she was put in a full-body cast and had daily physiotherapy treatments. By early 1942, she was in leg casts, getting weekly physiotherapy, and was able to walk (“with a sailor’s rolling gait on thin “pipestem” legs”) for an hour a day.

It’s plausible that Arcilia’s photo and story were also published in other Texas papers that year, as the objective of the article was to highlight the support she’d received from the Texas Crippled Children’s Bureau.

Where did Arcilia’s name come from? It’s a variant of the name Araceli, from “Virgen de Araceli,” a title for the Virgin Mary used in Lucena, Spain. Araceli comes from the Latin words ara, meaning “altar,” and coeli, meaning “sky.”

What are your thoughts on the name Arcilia?

Sources:

  • “Bright-Eyed Paralysis Victim Is Walking Again After Good Care.” El Paso Herald-Post 24 Jan. 1942: 4.
  • Araceli – Behind the Name

Baby name story: Handa

Puffins on Handa Island (Scotland)

English ornithologist Reynold Bray, “an Arctic explorer of considerable achievement and much promise,” was traveling through northern Canada with Scottish glaciologist Patrick Baird when he was lost at sea in 1938.

On 14 September, their engine broke down about 65 kilometres south of Igloolik and Baird waded ashore to get some water to make tea. But when he returned to shore after an hour’s hike inland, the tide was too high for his hip waders, so he called to Bray [to] use their collapsible dinghy to bring a line ashore. Bray tried, but took only a single oar with him and was swept away in heavy seas, never to be seen again.

A month earlier, on August 10, a baby girl had been born to Reynold’s wife Gillian back in England.

Notice was cabled to Bray at Churchill [in Manitoba] where he was waiting to embark upon what proved to be his last expedition. At his request the child was named Handa, after a bird island off the northwest coast of Scotland that he and Mrs. Bray had visited the previous May.

Handa Island’s Scottish Gaelic name, Eilean Shannda, is of mixed Gaelic/Norse etymology and means “island at the sandy river.” These days, Handa Island is a wildlife reserve.

What are your thoughts on the baby name Handa?

P.S. Pat Baird married Bray’s widow in early 1940, and they went on to have four more children: Neil (1941), Kirsty (1943), Elspeth (1947), and Anna (1948).

P.P.S. Handa Bray inherited Shere Manor Estate in Surrey in 1964. Currently, she is the fifteenth — and first female — Lord of the Manor.

Sources:

  • Birds of Nunavut, Vol. 1. Ed. by James M. Richards, Anthony J. Gaston. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2018.
  • “Explorer’s Baby Named After Island.” Geraldton Guardian and Express [Australia] 17 Jan 1939: 4.
  • “Mr. Reynold Bray.” Nature 4 Mar. 1939.
  • Roberts, Thomas S., T. S. Palmer and W. L. McAtee. “Obituaries.” The Auk Vol. 57, No. 1 (Jan., 1940), pp. 137-140.
  • Handa Island – Wikipedia

Image: Puffins by Donald Macauley under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Where did the baby name Kawhi come from in 2013?

The unusual name Kawhi debuted in the U.S. baby name data in 2013 and has been on the rise ever since.

  • 2016: 42 baby boys named Kawhi
  • 2015: 12 baby boys named Kawhi
  • 2014: 25 baby boys named Kawhi
  • 2013: 7 baby boys named Kawhi [debut]
  • 2012: unlisted
  • 2011: unlisted

What put this name on the map?

Professional basketball player Kawhi (pronounced kah-WAI) Leonard, who has had a successful career playing for several NBA teams: the San Antonio Spurs (2011-2018), the Toronto Raptors (2018-2019), and currently the LA Clippers. So far he’s won two NBA championships (2014 & 2019) and, both times, he was named Finals MVP.

Where did his name come from?

Kawhi Leonard told ESPN that his late father, Mark, “said he wanted something that sounded Hawaiian” for his son’s name. (Kawhi, the youngest in the family, has four older sisters.) So the name “Kawhi” is a take on the name of the Hawaiian island Kauai (which is most properly pronounced with three syllables: kuh-WAI-ee).

What are your thoughts on the name Kawhi? (Do you like it more or less than the name Kauai?)

Source: Kawhi Leonard – Wikipedia, Kawhi Leonard’s quiet drive – ESPN

The 10 children of Arthur Guinness

Brewer Arthur Guinness (1725-1803)
Arthur Guinness

In 1759, Arthur Guinness founded Ireland’s now-famous Guinness Brewery.

A couple of years later, in 1761, he married his wife Olivia. She had 21 pregnancies — 10 live births and 11 miscarriages. (“It is a testament to her solid constitution that she survived 21 pregnancies in an era when so many women died in childbirth.”)

Here are the names of their ten children (4 girls, 6 boys):

  1. Elizabeth (born in 1763)
  2. Hosea (1765)
  3. Arthur II (1768)
  4. Edward (1772)
  5. Olivia (1775)
  6. Benjamin (1777)
  7. William Lunell (1779)
  8. Louisa (1781)
  9. John Grattan (1783)
  10. Mary Anne (1787)

Three of Arthur’s sons — Arthur II, Benjamin, and William Lunell — ended up working in the family business.

I don’t know where the middle name “Lunell” came from, but “Grattan” was a surname on Olivia’s side of the family. It was her mother’s maiden name, and it was also the surname of distant cousin/politician Henry Grattan, “through whose lobbying major changes in the fiscal status of beer were eventually secured, most dramatically with the abolition of the excise duty on beer in 1795.”

Sources: