Edward Krumreig XVIII of Cape Coral, Florida, died last week—two months before his great-grandson and namesake is due.
If Edward the 18th could have lived until mid-April, the family patriarch would have joined Edward the 19th, Edward the 20th and Edward the 21st.
It would have been the first time in the 525-year family history four men named Edward Ludwig Krumreig were alive. [Link]
Martin Luther King, Jr., is a graphics designer and children's book author who lives in the suburbs of Atlanta. He goes by "Marty."
Marty King, 53, was named for his father, who was named for the German monk and theologian Martin Luther, founder of the Protestant Reformation in the early 1500s.
It's not the only famous name in his family. Marty King's grandfather was named Abraham Lincoln.
The name connection has caused some hassles along the way. There was the time the U.S. Postal Service canceled his mail and marked it "deceased." [Link]
Family legend has it that Lyndon K. Boozer—born July 19, 1963, in Washington, D. C.—got his name because his mother wanted more time off from work.
Her boss, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, stopped by to visit the new mother and her husband, a Treasury official.
She told the vice president that her son would be named Kyle Lyndon Boozer in his honor. If you switch his first and middle names, I'll extend your maternity leave, Johnson reportedly told her. The baby's parents took the deal. [Link]
There are two opposing camps in Milton, Delaware: one that thinks the town was named for its long history as a mill town, and another that thinks it was named for poet John Milton. At a recent gathering held to mark the bicentennial of the naming, one of the factions heard some good news.
Near the end of the evening, Milton resident and poet Jamie Brown, owner of the John Milton & Co. bookstore and the founder of the annual John Milton Memorial Celebration of Poets and Poetry, said he had more proof - a first reference to Milton in the letter of a man who had emigrated from Delaware to Iowa around 1840, talking about how the town named Milton in Iowa was named after the town he had left that had been named for the poet.Delaware Public Archives Director Russ McCabe had some words of wisdom for those who remained unconvinced.
“For now, if you want to believe the town is named for the mills, you can. If you want to believe it was named for the poet you can. Sometimes history isn’t so much what you can prove – it’s what you can’t disprove,” McCabe said. [Link]
Robert E. Lee of Cordele, Georgia, is honored to have the name of a general celebrating his 200th birthday this month.
But it didn't carry much honor when he was Pfc. Lee fighting in Germany with the 95th Infantry Division during World War II.
"I got a lot of kidding about it," he said. "'The famous General Robert E. Lee,' they would say."
His buddies' kidding he could take; getting shot was different.
"One [of] my buddies shot me accidentally while we were pulling back from the front for a rest," he said. [Link]
It's good to know that even Wellesley-educated Senators can fall for dubious family stories. Hillary Rodham Clinton was always told that she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, famous for summiting Mount Everest.
Even though Bill Clinton repeated the story in his 2004 autobiography, “My Life,” Hillary Clinton did not mention it in her own autobiography, “Living History,” which was published in 2003.
But one big hole has been poked in the story over the years, both in cyberspace and elsewhere: Sir Edmund became famous only after climbing Everest in 1953. Mrs. Clinton, as it happens, was born in 1947. [Link]
