What’s Behind a Name...and Some Family History

I’ve posted about this on my private Facebook page, but I wanted to detail a little more behind the history of our daughter’s name.

You see, my husband is a very proud Southerner.  He is from a small town named Boaz, perched atop a plateau in Alabama’s northeastern corner, called Sand Mountain.  It is, the Heart of Dixie!

When we first met (in August 2001), I didn’t realize how much of the South he carried with him on a day-to-day basis.

I think it’s probably because we met in Birmingham, AL.   So, the South was all around us.

Jump forward a year later and we had moved to my home state of Texas. This was one year after we were married. (Doing the math?  Yes, we jumped the gun and got hitched just six months after meeting.).  While I had been away from my home state, I realized how much of my Tex-Mex heritage I carried in everything I did.

It wasn’t until we moved that I realized just how much of the South he carried with him wherever we moved.

His passion for SEC football intensified to a level it’s never subsided from, probably just intensified even more.  (It’s important to note that his father was a University of Georgia football player in the late 70s and that both he and his mom are Georgia grads). 

His craving for classic Southern food turned into wonderful rituals where he takes it upon himself to cook four-course meals at breakfast, lunch, dinner and of course…for EVERY SEC football Saturday.  Even more special though, was his desire to raise a family with a healthy dose of Southern traditionalism, albeit, with strong doses of influence from my Mexican, Roman Catholic background. 

So, when we began thinking of baby names for our first-born, it was impossible for us to ignore the deep South.  Our baby girl is special in many ways, one of them is that she’s the first grandchild, from his generation, on his side of the family.  She’s also the first girl not joining his family by marriage in 2 generations!    This is why I had previously posted that I almost took it for granted that our first baby would likely be a boy and was so surprised that I was having a girl.

I love that my little girl has a heritage built by so many intertwining cultures.

Let me digress a little…

I’m a first generation American influenced by all things Southwestern (I’m originally from West Texas, not East…which is like being from a different country).  Now, I haven’t gone all Genealogy.com-crazy, but I did do a sizeable amount of tracing back on my father’s side and found out we have been bouncing around the American Southwest between Mexico and, really…what was still Mexico at that time,  since the late 1800s (Arizona, New Mexico & West Texas). 

Two brothers from a small town in  Aragon, Spain made the journey to America.  They came from a town called Tena, my maiden name!  There’s actually an entire gorgeous Tena Valley!    It sits near the border between France and Spain.  This probably explains why the family coat of arms and the last name itself are said to be of French descent.   A little more digging around and I found the town was at the heart of a four-century long Moorish (medieval N. African Muslim) conquest of Western Europe .  This town clings onto its Moorish influence.   Explains my hair, doesn’t it?? J

Anyway, it was fantastic to discover our name had such a deep history.

So, with me finally finding out a little more as to where I was from and her daddy discovering recently that his great, great, great grandfather was a Confederate Civil War veteran, I was certain that whichever name we picked, it had to be loaded with history!

We decided on Savannah Jean Wilson.

In detail, here's why:



Her name above her crib makes it official!

Savannah: A group of Native Americans known as the Savannah figured prominently in Southern colonial history and, according to widely published accounts, gave their name to the Savannah River. At least some of the Indians in question were bands of the much traveled Shawnee linguistic group, and the vague similarity of the names has given rise to an etymology that derives both Savannah and Shawnee from ‘Saawanwa’, meaning, 'Southerner.' This is the Shawnee name for themselves. In essence, Savannah is Shawnee for 'Southerner.'

-Bruce L. Pearson, University of South Carolina

Jean: Adam's late grandfather was named Hermon Eugene Wilson, Jr. and was known as “Gene.” Since our daughter would have been his first great-grandchild, we thought it was appropriate she carry a part of his name, but in its female form, Jean.