The Meda List

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I’m choosing to stay at arms length from digging into current events and issues that I would normally be eager to investigate. Somewhat fragile health is frustrating, and I’ve decided to reduce the stress and anxiety by just putting these things aside for a while and looking elsewhere for puzzles to challenge my curiosity, chasing questions of less social consequence.

Here’s an example.

Meda, my wife’s name, is unusual, and I have to admit that we have never known much about it’s origin.

Meda was named after her maternal grandmother, Meda Mendardi Renton.

Given Meda Menardi’s Italian heritage, we long held the belief that “Meda” was an Italian name. It sounds Italian, and it’s easy to imagine it rolling off the tongue in an Italian accent.

But as I was fiddling around this week, I asked several AI assistants if “Meda” is an Italian name. There was general agreement it is not considered Italian nor found much in Italy.

Meda is named after her grandmother, Meda Menardi, shown here with her husband, James Lewis Renton, on their wedding day in Sept. 1921.

Then I found a list buried in one of my digital archives in which Meda’s grandmother, prior to her death in 1980, wrote out the names every “Meda” in the family that she could remember. She placed herself as #3 in the Meda list, which appears at the bottom of this post.

In the #2 spot was her aunt, her father’s sister, Almeda Menardi (married name Rising). So she was likely named for this aunt, still consistent Meda being a traditional name in her Italian family.

I then tracked back to the first Menardi to come to the United States, Joseph Sebastian Menardi, sometimes identified as Giuseppe Sebastian Menardi. I’ve had trouble dating his entry into the United States, but it appears to have been in the late 1700s or early 1800s. Family lore has it that he was drawn into late 18th century Italian and European revolutionary movements at the time of the French Revolution, and was ultimately forced to flee. Whether that’s true or not is, well, unsettled.

Genealogical records suggest he joined other early pioneer settlers of the towns of Wysox and Towanda, Bradford County, Pennsylvania, located in the Susquehanna River Valley along the New York line, and his descendants intermarried with other pioneer families in that part of Pennsylvania.

But then a noticed a problem with the Mendardi origin story.

Joseph Sebastian Menardi had a son, Andrew Elijah Menardi, born in 1826. Andrew was the grandfather of Meda’s grandmother. Is your brain having trouble with the generations? It took me days to wrap my head around the information without getting hopelessly confused and losing track of generations.

But here’s the thing. The name “Meda” doesn’t appear to have been handed down within the Menardi family, but from the family of Andrew Mendardi’s wife, Mary Lemora Mendardi, born Morgan.

Mary Morgan Menardi had a sister, Harriet Almeda Morgan, born in 1818 to parents Harry Morgan (1790-1872) and Harriet Bishop (1794-1868). And Meda’s grandmother identified this Harriet Almeda Morgan, whose married name was Fowler, as the first Meda.

I haven’t started to claw my way back through the next generation or two of the Morgan and Bishop families, looking for more appearances of the names Almeda or Meda that would further confirm this new origin story.

It was only at this point that I recalled an aside suggested by one of the AI assistants that I had initially discounted because it was inconsistent with the Menardi thesis.

In English-speaking regions—particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries—Meda became a popular diminutive for Almeda. Parents would often name a child Almeda on official records while using Meda as the “call name” or everyday nickname. This pairing was especially common in American pioneer and rural communities, where Almeda saw its peak popularity.

Screenshot

These family roots go back hundreds of years

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Years ago, probably about the time I was graduating from high school, my mother gave me a recently published book: “The Journal of James Yonge [1647-1721]: Plymouth Surgeon.”

This James Yonge was a naval surgeon whose journal provides an insider’s peek at this period of history. He was also a direct ancestor some ten generations back, born in 1647, exactly 300 years before my birth.

My maternal grandfather, Duke Yonge, moved to the islands from California and it didn’t take too long to meet and marry my Hawaiian grandmother in 1911. He is formally referred to as John Duke Yonge, but none of his surviving paperwork includes the “John.”

The life of his father, James Frederick Moore Yonge, demonstrates how global families were in those days.

Inside the front cover, my mother carefully listed the generations, which might be of interest to some.

A haunting bit of writing

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A reader shared an article with me that deserves to be more widely read!

The article, by Nora Lindström, appears online at spacedaily.com.

The lede grabs me, as this is something I think about regularly when mulling over the future of my digital archives, including family photos and recollections, along with the memories, the sights, sounds, smells the photos draw from the depths of memory. My parents and my sister are long dead, but they are still embedded in my memories, and when those are gone they will die a second death. Every generation must face this, but it’s different now that it is our time.

Margaret is seventy-three and keeps a photograph on her dresser of her father in a wool suit, standing on the steps of a Glasgow tenement in 1952, holding a cigarette he hasn’t lit yet. She can tell you what his hands looked like before the arthritis bent them. She can describe the particular way he laughed when something genuinely surprised him, a sound she says she hasn’t heard come out of any other human in fifty years. When she dies, that sound dies. Not the photograph. The sound. The texture of him at twenty-six, standing in a doorway he no longer stands in, alive in a country that no longer exists, held only in the soft tissue of one woman’s brain.

This is the bereavement no one schedules. The 1950s generation — those born roughly between 1946 and 1964, depending on which demographer you ask, which is itself a contested act of naming — is the last cohort whose lived memories of their parents include those parents as young adults. They watched their mothers in housedresses on linoleum kitchens. They watched their fathers come home from factories and offices that have since been demolished or converted into lofts. When they go, those parents go a second time.

Most discussions of grief end at the funeral. The cultural script tells us that mourning has stages, that there is a beginning and a middle and something resembling an end, that you eventually integrate the loss and carry it forward. What the script doesn’t account for is the slow second death of the dead — the moment when the last person who remembers them not as a name on a stone but as a young man slicing an apple, a young woman braiding her hair before a mirror, finally stops breathing.

Read the whole story here.