Life in Memory Gardens Cemetery: A Name That Sounds As Sweet

The one thing I often see at Memory gardens are names—rows upon rows of names.

Names have always been important to me since I was named due to the events surrounding how I came to be adopted by my family.

My mother was in the hospital trying to recover from an operation—a hysterectomy, but because of her multiple sclerosis, she wasn’t doing as well as the doctors would have liked. Being LDS, she believed and asked for a blessing, which my father and their ward bishop performed. During the prayer, the bishop assured my mother she would be well and be blessed with another child. This astonished my mother who reminded the religious leader why she was in the hospital in the first place. He smiled and assured her that he only said things he was inspired by God to say.

A few months later, after a complete recovery, a doctor friend called my mother while she was at home and told her to come to the hospital, “We have your daughter here.” Flabbergasted, mother told my daddy what the phone call was about. According to her version, he resisted taking her and it took all her powers of persuasion to get him to do it. But as “soon as he saw you,” she would say, “he had to have you.”

Since momma didn’t like the long name “Elizabeth” which is a Hebrew name meaning “Covenant/Oath with God” which fit the situation, she shortened the name to “Beth” which in Hebrew means “house,” “temple,” the latter being a place where people take oaths or covenant with God for certain blessings.

Daddy got to give me my middle name. I still have the envelope he used to create the name using his deceased mother’s and his beloved step-mother’s names “Elmajean.” Elma is Dutch or German and means “protection,” while Jean is a variant form of John or the Hebrew name Yochanan, meaning “YAHWEH is gracious.”

Then there’s my last name Boldman—it Dutch or most likely German from the word “bald” meaning “brave” and mann, meaning “man”.

Put altogether, my name has a big meaning that I didn’t appreciate until I was out of my teens.

I’ve found and met some very interesting names and the people who go with them in the gardens next door. One is Bobby Edmund Laskie. Bobby is a nickname for Robert which is English for “famed,” and “bright.” Edmund means “protector,” while Laskie could be English, Welsh, or Scottish which means “cave,” but it could also be Slovakian, with a meaning for “love.”

An interesting person living in the cemetery is Peggy Leyba. Believe it or not the name Peggy is a variant of “Margaret” which shortened is “Meg” which rhymes with “Peg.” Margaret means “Pearl” in Greek. Leyba may or may not come from related Romanian, Spanish and Latin versions all of which mean “wolf;” thus “Wolf Pearl.”

Another person I often walk by is Eric Holden Uselman. Eric is, of course Norse or Viking, meaning “honorable ruler.” Holden is English and has two meanings; the first means “one from Holden” which is a village in Yorkshire; and the second is “hollow, sunken, deep, a valley.” Uselman might be Latvian (a teeny weeny country next to Russia) which refers to an oak tree. Put in a phrase, his name means “an honorable ruler from a valley of oak trees.”

I could go on and on, but I’ll do one more, a name the pups eventually dash by on their way to chase ground squirrels—Jesus Manuel Medrano. Jesus, as you may or may not know, is Hebrew for “God will help or Jehovah is generous.” Manuel is the shorten form of Emmanuel, which means “God is with us,” while Medrano means a person who is rich or wealthy. Clearly, his mother and father wanted their son to be blessed by God and good fortune, and why not? What type of parents wouldn’t want such things to be around a boy child?

Yes, what your name means, tells a great deal about who you are, but also about what your parents hoped for you, their gratitude, their prayers. So if you don’t know what your name means, I urge you to find out. Ask your parents, if possible, why they named you what they did, if you don’t know already. And remember that one day, it will be carved deeply into a headstone or bronze nameplate, and perhaps a stranger will walk her dogs by it, read your name, and come to know just a tidbit about who lies beneath the sod. That really isn’t a poor legacy, now is it?