"HERE LIES INTERED THE BODY OF ELDER PRESERVED CLAPP OF NORTHAMPTON WHO DIED SEPTEMBER THE 22 1720 IN THE 77 YEAR OF HIS AGE"
I was recently reading a blog about puritan names and saw a comment by Shannon Love that I liked:
...Many of the words used in these names have shifted meaning in the intervening centuries.
“Humiliation” for example, in medieval times, meant an reduction in social rank. In an aristocratic society in which social rank was everything, it had the same effects as demotion in military rank has today. By the 17th century, it had shifted to mean more in the modern sense of “to be humbled”. It was nearly a century later until the word acquired its current sense of degrading emotional embarrassment.
A Puritan naming their child “Humiliation” was, in contemporary terms, naming their child “He who is humbled/humble” with the “before God” always implied.
“Merit” originally meant “entitled” usually in the sense of being born to a station in life. To a lesser extent it meant a reward, usually an elevation in social rank. A Puritan naming his child “No-Merit” was in modern terms naming his child “Not born entitled to special treatment.” and likely “humble before god” implied.
“Fly” had the connotation of fast as in “Flying Dutchman” or “Flying Artillery” so a “Fly-Debate” meant a fast debate that ended quickly because one side’s argument proved so obviously true. Today we would say, “there’s no debate” or “no questioning”. The Puritans was naming his child to mean something like, “No questioning faith in God”.
And so on…
I have yet to find another meaning for preserved that would make the name less horrible when combined with Clapp.
While many Puritan names were downers like the aforementioned Humiliation and names such as Obedience, Forsaken, and Prudence, many others were joyful such as Felicity, Liberty and Hope.
I continue to laugh as I read through my genealogy and come across the names from that era; Submit Strong and Mindwell Bartlett (let's create passive women, grrrrr) but nothing makes me laugh harder or pity more than poor old Preserved Clapp, Sr. and Jr. ha ha ha.
