How popular is the baby name Bernice in the United States right now? How popular was it historically? Find out using the graph below! Plus, check out all the blog posts that mention the name Bernice.
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Charles and Effie Dickey of Maine married in 1881 and went on to welcome 22 children — 14 girls, 8 boys — from the 1880s until the 1910s.
Here are the names of all the kids:
Emma Mae (b. 1882)
Ada Alice (b. 1883)
Arthur Earness (b. 1884)
Everlena Maude (b. 1885)
Fannie Blossom (b. 1886)
Nina Eudora (b. 1887)
George Elwin (b. 1888)
Fay Edna (b. 1889)
Everett Onward (b. 1890)
Merritt Carnot (b. 1891)
Lema Inez (b. 1894)
Margaret Ellen (b. 1896)
Charles Loring (b. 1897)
Effie Etta (b. 1898)
Mildred Hortense (b. 1900)
Ivan Thomas Nye (b. 1901)
Floyd Merton (b. 1903)
Arline Beatrice (b. 1904)
Theodore Rayden (b. 1906)
Jessie Alberta (b. 1908)
Ila Pearl (b. 1909)
Hilda Bernice (b. 1911)
I think it’s funny that they decided to name two of the children after themselves only after already having a dozen. Maybe they were running out of ideas at that point. :)
Which of the above is your favorite? (I’d have to go with #8’s middle, “Onward.” What an interesting choice.)
In the late ’40s, long before the name Tanya (a diminutive of Tatiana) reached peak trendiness in the ’70s, some specific Tanya-based names started debuting:
Latanya and Latonia first appeared in ’47. Ltanya followed in ’49. Latonya popped up in 1951, and other variants appeared later, including the intriguing LaTanga.
What influenced the usage of these names?
My guess is Hollywood-based African-American fashion designer L’Tanya Griffin.
She started to become famous during the second half of the ’40s. Her name began appearing newspapers around 1946, and it was often spelled “LaTanya” and “La Tanya.” (Her birth name was Julia Bernice Hilbert, incidentally.)
In mid-1949, a specific event made L’Tanya Griffin front-page news: Her estranged husband Earl tried to assault her with a beer can full of lye at racetrack in Atlantic City. She was uninjured, but her friend Marshall Miles (former manager of boxer Joe Louis) and several other people suffered first degree burns. Worst off was Earl himself, as the lye had splashed back into his face. It got into his eyes and blinded him (not permanently, turns out).
L’Tanya was at the height of her fashion-fame during the 1950s. She was even on the cover of Jet in mid-1954. The magazine sometimes ran pictures of her young daughter L’Tanya as well.
I’m not sure what became of L’Tanya Griffin after her fame waned in the ’60s, but I did discover that one of the babies named “LaTanya” in 1949 was none other than Samuel L. Jackson’s wife LaTanya Richardson.
Do you like the name L’Tanya?
Sources:
“Acid Toss by Hubby Backfires.” New York Age 20 Aug. 1949: 1.
“Fashions by L’Tanya” Ebony Aug. 1947: 24.
Kirkham, Pat and Shauna Stallworth. “”Three Strikes Against Me”: African American Women Designers.” Women Designers in the USA, 1900-2000: Diversity and Difference, ed. by Pat Kirkham, The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, 2000, pp. 123-144.
Taffy isn’t just a type of candy — it’s also a name, and it debuted in the U.S. baby name data in 1943:
1947: 12 baby girls named Taffy
1946: 6 baby girls named Taffy
1945: unlisted
1944: 5 baby girls named Taffy
1943: 6 baby girls named Taffy [debut]
1942: unlisted
1941: unlisted
Why?
Because of Taffy Tucker, a new character introduced in the Terry and the Pirates comic strip during 1942.
Titular character Terry Lee joined the military in 1942, and there he met new people, including Taffy Tucker, an Army nurse, and Flip Corkin, an Army flight instructor (who was also Taffy’s boyfriend).
Taffy Tucker was a “spunky, dedicated nurse, hardworking and tireless, cheerful and caring and always feminine.”
At one point in the storyline, Taffy was kidnapped by a Japanese agent. She was beaten and left for dead in the interior of China. Thankfully, she was eventually rescued by Terry and Flip.
It took cartoonist Milton Caniff about three months to create the character:
[He] spent several days just worrying about a name for Taffy. Since he visualized her as a pert, snub-nosed girl from Georgia, he wanted a name with a typically Old South sound. He finally settled on Guinevere Marianne Tucker, nicknamed Taffy because of her candy-colored hair. She had to be short, because she was scheduled to fall in love with Flip Corkin, who is short, and she had to be blond [sic] for contrast with Flip, who is dark.
Caniff had modeled Taffy after a photo of real-life WWII military nurse Bernice Taylor of Kansas.
Harvey, Robert C. Meanwhile…: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2007.
Bainbridge, John. “Significant Sig and the Funnies: Milton Caniff.” Milton Caniff: Conversations. Ed. Robert C. Harvey. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2002.
P.S. The name Taffy got a slight boost around 1949 thanks to the film The Doctor and the Girl, in which the young Dr. Corday has a love interest named Evelyn “Taffy” Heldon who operates a taffy machine in a candy store.
P.P.S. Other Terry and the Pirates-inspired baby names include Normandie, Merrily, and Raven.
The name also saw it’s highest-ever usage that year, as did the variant spelling Corretta. And another spelling, Koretta, appeared for the very first time in the data in 1968.
What was bringing all this attention to the baby name Coretta in 1968?
Coretta Scott King. She was the wife of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., until his assassination on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. This event put Coretta and her children (Yolanda, Martin III, Dexter, and Bernice*) in the national spotlight.
Not long after the death of her husband, Coretta took Martin’s place as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement. She was instrumental in establishing the national holiday Martin Luther King, Jr. Day — which happens to be today.
Coretta Scott King was named in honor of her paternal grandmother, Cora. The name Cora is a Latinized form of the ancient Greek name Kore (“maiden”), one of the epithets of the goddess Persephone.
*Usage of the names Yolanda and Dexter also increased markedly in 1968. The usage of Martin, which had been declining, saw an uptick that year. (Peak usage was in 1963, the year of MLK’s legendary “I have a dream” speech.) The usage of Bernice was seemingly unaffected by the assassination.
Dexter, Yolanda, Bernice, and Martin III
Incidentally, in her 1969 book My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King talked about the naming of her daughters Yolanda (nicknamed Yoki) and Bernice:
I chose the name Yolanda Denise, but my husband had reservations about it. He questioned whether people would call her Yolanda or would mispronounce the name. He was right. Her name is so frequently mispronounced that it bothered her when she was growing up.
There is a tendency among middle-class African Americans to give their children unusual names. Perhaps they are seeking elegance or some special identification. I fell victim to this custom, rather than following the sensible practice of naming the baby after a member of the family. Later Martin said, “If we ever have another baby girl, I’m going to give her a simple name like Mary Jane.”
When we did have another daughter, we called her Bernice Albertine, after her two grandmothers. Her name was not quite Mary Jane, but at least she was named for members of the family.
Tuesday’s post about the Victorian-style Tylney Hall Hotel reminded me of a list of Victorian-era names that I’ve had bookmarked forever.
The list was created by amateur genealogist G. M. Atwater as a resource for writers. It contains names and name combinations that were commonly seen in the U.S. from the 1840s to the 1890s. Below is the full list (with a few minor changes).
Victorian Era Female Names
Victorian Era Male Names
Abigale / Abby
Ada
Adella
Agnes
Allie
Almira / Almyra
Alva
America
Amelia
Ann / Annie
Arrah
Beatrice
Bernice
Charity
Charlotte
Chastity
Claire
Constance
Cynthia
Dorothy / Dot
Edith
Edna
Edwina
Ella
Eleanor
Ellie
Elizabeth / Eliza / Liza / Lizzy / Bess / Bessie / Beth / Betsy
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