Our first four children’s names begin with the letters M A R and K (not in order, and completely inadvertent). Our fifth (and last) child has a name that begins with the first letter of my wife’s name. After I realized what we had done, I told Deanna: Now we just need five more children, to use up the remaining letters in your name.

You can see how far that suggestion went.

… where I will undoubtedly bring up my two favorite central Utah names of the late 19th century: Josephina Brighamina, and DeBris.

“I never took a dinner at Clifton when there was not champagne, whether company was there or not. Jim (a servant) started to fill my glass and I put my hand over it. ‘Take thy hand off thy glass, Joe’ said Uncle Johns. ‘Let the wine stand if thee does not want it, but don’t publish thy temperance resolves.’”

Also, my father-in-law wrote back that it was Frederick Pack whose example he followed in initially majoring in geology. Though Frederick Pack had died before my father-in-law was born, the family still talked of him admiringly. Frederick’s older brother Quince Rufus lived to an advanced age, and my father-in-law was close to him.

Speaking of Quince Rufus: he had a younger half-sister Sedenia Tamson and an older half-brother Orson Parley. Get the pattern? The things it takes to name 45 children! Fortunately for Frederick James, this particularly naming scheme ended before he came along. Walter Xenophon and Yoma Zenith weren’t so lucky.