Chauncey, or the Joy of Onomastics
My cousin Chauncey, whom I always knew as Uncle Chauncey, taught me the joy of onomastics. Onomastics is the study of names — first names, last names, middle names — what they mean and how they are patterned, how they fit together, how they frame families and how families and individuals are traced through them.
Sensing, I think, that in each generation of my maternal family there is one living genealogist, he gave me a copy of the big red brick of Howell genealogy when I was in elementary school, and it became to me what more normal children have in books of baseball statistics or wildlife catalogues. By the time I was in fifth grade, the child had become the father of the man, with my teacher Mrs. Hunt letting me do an independent study on the surnames of all of my classmates and presenting them each with a dot-matrix printed sheet of paper at the end of the marking period in lieu of taking spelling tests.
Chauncey was English, Dutch-not-Pennsylvania-Dutch, and Pennsylvania German in his own background, but taught himself Italian as a young man because he wanted to read Petrarch and Dante — and because he wanted to enter into the lives of the mysterious Italian Americans he knew in both eastern Pennsylvania and his adopted New York City.
Chauncey’s conversational method was sparkling with onomastics. Upon meeting a Piscitello, he would say “Little fisherman! You’re a little fisherman!” and Mrs. Piscitello would instantly fall in love with him — tell him about her children and her parents, and bring him cannoli a few times a year. The same was true with the family of my great uncle Al Boccadoro, whom he would always call the Golden Mouths and joke about being related to the childless St. John Chrysostom. He had endless fun with my Italian surname and its meaning of Midwife, and the neighbors across the street named Labate, which was really il abbate — the abbot. He also enjoyed the local Scalzadonnas, whose last name means “barefoot lady,” and the derivation of which we were never able to discover.
One of the lessons he taught me was about occupational surnames like Smith that repeat themselves over and over not just in numbers but across languages, printing on my mind early on that the Arabic, Lebanese and Syrian last name Haddad is also Smith. Just as Smith in Italian is Ferraro, and Schmidt in German, and Kowalski in Polish, and McGowan in Gaelic, and Herrero in Spanish, Lefebvre in French, and Sedaris in Greek. He created instant good will in a Hungarian American conversation partner named Kovacs by saying “Mr. Smith!” one Saturday in Yorkville, and the friendship endured for years.
He was also a student of patterns — the constant use in his aunt my great grandmother’s family of Dorothy as the first daughter’s name, whether she goes by Do, Dotty, Dorrie, or Daisy — and the giving of middle names as a kind of professional tribute by men in honor of their business partners. He unlocked the secret for me of tracing the networks of college and seminary attendance by the ways in which Hopkins, DeKoven, or Sitgreaves pop up in little boys’ names during the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Yiddish and its first names and surnames was another lifelong fascination after his arrival in New York as a columnist for Women’s Wear Daily, and Chauncey took no small delight in bending Pennsylvania German into something that could be understood by confused Lubavitchers. “Silberman? But where is your silver?” “Dr. Kirschenbaum, where is your cherry tree?” “Fischbein? When was the last time you saw a whale?” I treasured a funny cassette tape of Gilbert and Sullivan in Yiddish he had given me for Christmas one year, which I played until cassettes went the way of the great auk. It is thanks to him that I never meet a Garfunkel or Garfinkel without thinking of rubies, or a Kahn without knowing they are all Moses’ nephews.
He was amused and confused, too, by the ways in which Americans change their surnames, often to become more “American” by some understanding of that slippery idea. Uncle Al Boccadoro abandoned Chrysostom and blended in as a Parker. Many of my Mammana cousins are now Mannings. Orazio Dongani, the Italian American Bishop of New York, went by Horace Donegan. Pennsylvania German Troxells changed themselves into Turners, and plenty of Wöppels became Whipples. With his whip-smart linguistic mind (he had been a Classics major at Amherst, and boasted that he went there because their Greek was better than he could get at Yale or Harvard) he was able to get behind the new surnames of new Americans and somehow situate the process of family development and change in his understanding of a person within a community.
There is no deep magic here. Chauncey’s way of creating joy in the moment of meeting someone was to say not so indirectly “your name matters because it says something about you and where you come from, and you matter because we’ve met and now we have something to talk about.” It made for spontaneous, mutually-arising warmth and mirth, but it also placed a man who lived his entire life as a bachelor in a moveable and changeable group of new families himself.
For all this, Chauncey Delphin Howell, Jr.’s own name is a mystery, because his father’s birth certificate has his first name as Willis. There was no Willis Howell after his first birthday, and Chauncey, Sr. went on to become a successful attorney and politician who navigated the Red Scares of 1950s Pennsylvania with aplomb and pretended to be a Presbyterian. The Jr. who had such a fascination with names was not perhaps a little perplexed by his own, but I carry it on my heart in gratitude and affection for as long as it will beat.
