Interprative Sundays

Every Sunday after the fourth of July at the Homestead we do a program called interprative Sundays. We open up the Berolet Log House, and let people come inside for once. We also try to do something interprative, like showing them how to spin, weave etc. Each of us interns was assigned an interprative sunday in which we had to come up with something all on our own. This is really what I have been waiting for right? The chance to do something academic and for the public at the same time.

So I threw around a lot of ideas and finally settled on naming. I was originally thinking of doing something with women, but I think the spinning, hearth cooking, activities do better justice than what I could. I decided to try to analize the naming practices of the various ethnic groups of the Oley Valley. I realized I couldn't do all of them, so I just picked a few prominent ones: Germans, English Quakers, Scotch Irish, and Native Americans.

The Germans were the hardest ones to find information on. Eventually I had to resort to googling it! (Gasp!) I found that it was pretty typical for Germans to name their kids after a parent of grandparent but that most people went by their middle names. The First name was usually the name of a Saint.

The quakers, being all about equality in the eyes of the Lord, probably have the most interesting naming tradtions. The really tried to divide the names equally between the mother's relatives and the father's relatives. For instance, the first son would be named after the mother's father, the second son named after the father's father, etc. I found this information in Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer.

The Scotch-Irish do things a little differently. Each first born son gets named after his grandfather. Therefore when you look at scotch irish families over times, the names tend to alternate. For instance, generation 1 would be John, generation 2 would be William, generation 3 would be John again, etc.

The Lenape have a tradtion that is not to different from the Germans. Each person gets a spiritual name from a shaman or a family member who has a vision. You're never supposed to say this name because the spirits can get wind of it and kill you. Only your close family members know your spiritual name. Everybody else calls you by various nicknames. Kind of like the Germans with their Saint's name and then a middle or nickname.

Right now I am in the process of deciding if I should do more ethnicities or just keep it at that. I should really keep Anglicans in mind, and also Swedes. My dilema is that I want to give a lot of information but I don't want to overwhelm people. They are there to have fun after all, not have a history lesson.