But sometimes names are given not to honor family members, but other people or things that the parents admire. Such turned out to be the case with my Cousin Barney's name. Who is Cousin Barney? In my perpetual quest to find more family lore and photographs, I track distant cousins. Well, maybe the stuff ended up in their branch, not mine, right? And so I found Barney, my second cousin twice removed who was also interested in family history. When I first contacted him about five years ago, he was the sole caregiver for his wife who had Alzheimer's. All he could manage was the occasional short phone conversation, or a brief letter. Barney lives four hours away, and does not do email, but his wife's steadily worsening condition meant that visits were out of the question.
Last winter, his wife passed away. I wanted to invite Barney to visit me when the weather warmed up, but life intervened. My father ended up having a quadruple bypass and valve replacement. I spent the summer going back and forth between Florida where he lives and Illinois, where my home is. More time passed, and a few weeks ago, a letter appeared from Barney asking when we could get together. As he pointed out, he is 88 and who knows how much longer he is going to be able to travel.This galvanized me. I called and said "Come as soon as possible!" He had to come to us because I still have a couple kids at home.
Barney arrived bearing several large photo albums and many, many stories. We had a fascinating visit. I recorded him talking about growing up in the New Orleans area in the 1930s and 1940s, and we identified and scanned photos. Because I had done more research, I was able to identify some family members that exceeded even his considerable memory. He was able to give me an understanding of many of our ancestors' personalities, an aspect that the research does not always uncover. By the end of the visit, I asked him, "Barney, how did you get your name?" He tilted his head to the side and looked at me quizzically.
Cousin Barney and I during our visit. Selfie courtesy of us.
His full name is Barney McCoy Landry Jr. I look at that name and think that he and his father must have been named for somebody in particular. Were there McCoys in his father's family that we don't know about? But Barney had no idea why he and his father had been given that name. He said jokingly, "Well, I have eliminated Barney Oldfield, Barney Fife and Barney Rubble as being the person I was named after." Okay, great. But I was curious, because I could not remember any figures from U.S. history with this name.
We had about fifteen minutes before he needed to hit the road so that he would be driving back home in daylight. I googled "Barney McCoy." I started finding the names of several other men whose first and middle names were Barney McCoy followed by different surnames. Interesting. Clearly others had also been named for a Barney McCoy, and they didn't necessarily seem to be related. Several, but not all were born in the 1890s like Cousin Barney's father. One man was listed on the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington D.C., and clearly was much younger than the other Barney McCoy Somethings. Then I started to come across references to a song.
On Google Books I found The Alabama Folk Lyric: A Study in Origins and Media of Dissemination by Ray Broadus Browne. Under the heading "Unhappy Love Songs" the author discusses a song called, you guessed it, "Barney McCoy" beginning on page 123. He states that it was a widely popular song in the 1870s, but that someone did not think to print up the words and music until 1881. Subsequently, it appeared in dozens of songsters, or sheet music collections. This is very interesting in light of the fact that Barney's grandmother was born and raised in Baldwin County, Alabama.
Song lyrics documented by Ray Broadus Browne, courtesy Google Books
Catharine Serena (White) Freeman Landry was born in March of 1859 to Asa J. White and Isabella Presley. She and her first husband Harry Freeman moved to Newton, Texas at some point in the mid 1880s between the births of their second and third children. Harry died in 1890 and was buried in the Watson Chapel Cemetery in Bleakwood. A historical marker explains that most of the people resting in that place worked in the lumber industry in Bleakwood. So we have a probable motivation for why the Freemans moved there. Baldwin County Alabama, where they came from, also had a large lumber industry as well as a turpentine factory.
The names of the three Freeman children all appear to be family names. But in 1891 Catharine remarried, this time to a French immigrant named Emile J. Landry. She had three additional children with him, and all three of them have names that were outside of the family, after some famous individual, or in her son Barney's case, after a song that Catharine must have adored in her youth. Her youngest son was named Henry Ward Beecher Landry, after the minister, abolitionist, lecturer, and womanizer, Henry Ward Beecher, who was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the famous anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. A biography of Beecher by Debby Applegate is entitled The Most Famous Man in America. Beecher was a household name, widely published and widely quoted, and he embarked on a lecture tour of The West in 1884. Could Catharine have heard him speak and then later named a son for him? Maybe.
Catharine's first child with Monsieur Landry was named Jesse Corbet Landry. Again, I have found many men named Jesse Corbet followed by another surname, but thus far I have not figured out if Jesse Corbet was either a living or legendary individual. There was a Jesse Corbet enumerated in the 1866 Alabama State Census, but more research is needed to say whether he is the namesake.
How did Barney react to the knowledge that it's highly probable that his name came from an old Alabama folk song? With great excitement! After I pieced together that theory, I went onto YouTube to see if I could find a recording. As we listened to the old scratchy rendition of the song, tears filled his eyes. An understanding of how we got our names is a crucial part of everyone's identity.
