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.

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.