It probably just goes with the territory, but I’ve noticed something. A big part of my job is searching for people on the internet. (Academics, of course.) Mostly these are folks I don’t know, some of them with very common names. This presents special challenges, of course. Every once in a while, though, you search for a name and pretty much every entry you find is an obituary. I’m not talking about someone prominent who has died, but rather several people with the same name who’ve passed away. The other day, after four or five pages of Google I found nobody alive. That particular name wasn’t an “old fashioned” name either. It could be (perhaps is) still a very common name. It does get me pondering whether some names are “safer” than others. Is anyone by this name still alive?
We place a lot of stock in our names. Being the way that others get our attention, and identify us, they do have importance. And many names are common—parents aren’t always the creative sort. And the internet is a source of frustration when trying to narrow down a common name and attach it to someone you don’t already know. Growing up, kids want to be like everyone else—no standing out in the herd. “Wiggins,” where I grew up, was an unusual name. We got teased for it quite a lot. When my mother remarried, my brothers and I went by our stepfather’s common last name for a few years. In seminary I decided to revert to my birth name—Wiggins. I was wanting to do two things: reclaim my heritage, and stand out a little. Even so, a web-search for Steve Wiggins will bring up at least four or five individuals not me, including an obituary or two.
Before the web, when trying to find a scholar you had to use letters. (Or maybe the phone, but cold calls weren’t really professional). You’d send them a letter. In a way, the web is a great equalizer. But it favors those with names that are somewhat less common. Some people change their names—performers and some authors do this to make their persona more to their liking—but this is a fraught activity. I know from switching back to my birth name that the process is complex and if you try it after you’ve started to publish things it adds whole new layers of complications. So I spend quite a bit of time searching for people who aren’t easily found. Not infrequently I seem to be naming the dead.