When you were a kid, going to one of those stores where they
sold bicycle “license plates” with boys and girls names printed on them, did you go and search for your own name? Ever
discover that they didn’t have yours, and feel crummy that your name was left out?
If your name was Nancy or Diane or Mike or John—something fun,
or stylish, or popular—you probably never got the chance to experience that
kind of feeling.
Imagine if your name was Chevis. That kind of name might
almost make you wish you had two
names….
One thing I learned as a Northerner raised by the daughter
of a Southerner: in the South, you didn’t just have one name. You were given
two. And both of them got used on a
regular basis—not just when you were in trouble.
That’s why it was Sarah Martha
and not just Sarah.
With that understanding under our belts, it seems puzzling
to find that the eldest daughter of Southerners Martha Cassandra and William David Davis
was called, simply, Lummie.
Where was her middle name? She almost seemed incomplete without
one, as if she weren’t a true Southerner. She had that middle name, of course—it
was spelled Bernishie in the family Bible, but I’ve seen it spelled differently
in other documents—but it was never used.
The situation with her younger sister seemed to be a hybrid
between the Southern style and a naming tradition seen in some European
cultures. She had two given names—Mary and Chevis—but both weren’t used in tandem. Like
the Irish or the Germans, who may have given a child a first name in honor of
some saint but never actually intended to use
that name in daily life, this Davis
daughter was always called, simply, Chevis. Never
Mary.
Admittedly, Chevis is as unusual a name—at least to me—as Lummie.
I had no idea what the name Lummie might have been short for until Wendy, a
fellow blogger and reader here, provided a viable suggestion. Nor do I have any
clue about where a name like Chevis might have come from.
Come to think of it, at this point, I don’t yet know what
cultural background either of her parents claimed. I have yet to arrive at the
juncture between American residents and European emigrants—although family lore
claims Wales as the origin
of the Davis
surname. We’ll see.
But about Chevis: before we proceed, I just have to take
this opportunity to disabuse you of any tendency to pronounce Chevis as if it
were part of that well-known blended Scotch whiskey named Chivas Regal. It is
not. As far as this Davis family pronounced it, the name sounded
quite plain. With an accent on the first syllable and a hard “ch” sound like “church,”
it was pronounced by everyone in the family I knew pretty straightforward.
When I was a kid, I got to thinking of it all as my mother’s
aunts with the weird first names: Lummie and Chevis. I never really knew much
about either of them, except that they were supposed to be real tall, and that
one of them used to live in Arizona.
Once I started researching these Davis relatives, I found out quite a bit
about Lummie, as you’ve already seen.
But Chevis? She was a mystery—and she still is to me, at
least through her teen years. My mother had told me that Chevis married young—and,
looking it up in the Davis
family Bible, I saw that she had married on September 18, 1913. That would put
her age as three months shy of her twentieth birthday. Not too young.
But Chevis was one of these family situations, I learned,
where what I was told about her didn’t
necessarily match up with what really happened to her. I discovered that, for
instance, when I stumbled upon the marriage bond for H. M. Chitwood and “Chevis
Davis.” Dated the same day as they were married, the record showed quite a
different report: February 18, 1914. (Frustratingly, a separate marriage index gives yet another date for their wedding: January 18.)
I had run across this file only recently. Before that, those
enigmatic initials had given me fits when I attempted researching the couple.
Alternating between searches using “Mary” and “Chevis”—and then guessing all
the possible misspellings of such an unusual name—coupling this search with a
man’s name given only as initials made for some slow going.
Another dead railroader....
ReplyDeletehttp://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=116447306
Harvey M Chitwood, killed in 1914.
Yes. One in my husband's family, and now one in my family, too. I get the feeling there were many of these...
DeleteSeven months married and pregnant and a widow. Oh my. :(
ReplyDeleteIt's been so long since I first discovered this part of my family history, and it still pains me to know it. How awful it must have been.
DeleteGood golly! That's a sad story.
ReplyDeleteI have an odd name in my family also: Chillis Ann. Every time I read "Chevis" I think "Chillis."
Now, that's a name I've never heard before, Wendy! But then, I never heard of Chevis, either--until I found out that was one of my aunts' name.
Delete