Popular Name is the theme for Week 24 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks. One name crops up in my family over and over, and unfortunately for my dad, he was saddled with it. When my dad was born, he was supposed to be named Susan. My grandmother was completely convinced he was a girl and was so heartbroken he wasn’t that for a while she dressed him up in girl clothes and let his hair grow long and curly. I don’t know if my grandmother was so depressed and disappointed that my dad was a boy that she let my grandfather pick a name or if she thoughtfully chose a family name, but “Susan” was replaced by “Eugene Harold.” Eugene Harold. My dad hated his name. It didn’t go with the tough-guy persona he liked to project. He felt it sounded weak and conjured up images of guys who get swirlies in high school bathrooms, like the character of Eugene in Grease. You can picture that, right? The dorky, skinny guy with the glasses? My dad wasn’t that guy. He loved nothing more than to regale us with stories of all the fistfights he got into and won. As strange as it sounds, my favorite Christmas Eve memories were of my dad and his brothers talking about all the fights of their youth. Being tough was a point of pride – it was how their dad raised them. My dad didn’t walk, he swaggered. If you saw him, you might peg him as a Harry, but definitely not a Eugene. He used to joke that he sounded like a demented Cabbage Patch Kid, and that in some ways he’d prefer to be “just a boy named Sue.”
Eugene was a popular name on both sides of his family – the Turners (paternal) and the Ladds (maternal) so I think someone was getting stuck with that moniker no matter what – my dad just happened to draw the short-straw. Here are some brief bios of all the Eugenes who came before my dad, starting with the Turners:
Harold Eugene Turner
(1907-1975)
Harold Eugene Turner was my dad’s uncle. He was likely named after his uncle, Harry Eugene Turner. Uncle Harold led an interesting life. He was the only one of his siblings to go to college, and we were always told that my grandfather dropped out of school to help support his family and pay for his brother Harold's education. I don’t know if that’s true. My dad didn’t know him well, but always made it a point to emphasize Uncle Harold’s intelligence. He was charming and quite the ladies’ man -- he married three times. He had one child, a daughter, from his first marriage, and remained on friendly terms with his first wife after their divorce. When America entered WWII, Harold felt the pull to serve. He was too old for the draft, and almost too old to enlist, but he volunteered for the Navy. He was stationed in the Pacific, and though he trained as a gunner, he spent the war below deck in the galley, cooking. After the war, he opened a little seashell souvenir shop in Hollywood, Florida.
Harry Eugene Turner
(1893-1929)
Harry Eugene was my dad’s granduncle – his grandfather Stanley’s younger brother. He was the baby of the family by a wide margin – he was 18 years younger than Stanley. While Stanley seemed eager to leave the family farm and Mount Vernon, Maine, Harry remained local. His WWI draft registration card lists him as a farmer, and his father as his employer. He married Josephine Elliott in 1917 and had four children: Violet Annie, Barbara Pearl, Clifford Lester, and Ralph Owen. Ralph Owen Turner appears on the 1940 census in the Pownal School, which was listed as a “home for the feeble-minded.” He must have been committed sometime after his father’s death. Harry seemed to be a steady person and a committed family-man. He died as a result of an accident while working on a dam. He was hospitalized for four weeks before passing away at the age of 36.
Eugene H. Turner
(1846-1937)
Eugene H. Turner, my great-great grandfather, was Harry Eugene’s father, and the first Turner in my direct-line to carry the name Eugene. He was also my first direct-line Turner born in Maine. He was the son of Charles Henry Turner of Boston, and Lucy Ann Bartlett of Mount Vernon, Maine. His father worked as a printer, but also ran a small farm where Eugene was born, lived, and died. He seemed to take to farming; he’s listed as a farmer on every census, and periodically mentioned in the agriculture section of the newspaper. He married Annie M. Shaw, and had three sons, including my great-grandfather, Stanley. I wish I knew more about him. It seems like he lived a quiet, simple life.
These are the Eugene Ladds. Eugene is used primarily as a middle name on my grandmother Helen’s side of the family:
Everett Eugene Ladd
(1916-1979)
Everett Eugene Ladd was my dad’s uncle – his mother Helen’s elder brother. I wrote an entire post about him here. I never met him but got to know him through the letters he wrote home to his mother during WWII.
Enoch Eugene Ladd
(1899-1919)
Enoch Eugene Ladd was my great-grandfather Dana’s younger brother. Isn’t he handsome? He was the son of Eugene Jenness Ladd and Hattie Emma Leighton. Enoch Eugene was born in Westbrook, Maine, and died in France during WWI. Like many soldiers, it wasn’t a battle wound that ended his life, but disease. More soldiers died from disease in WWI than from the war itself. I can’t imagine how lonely and scared he must have felt to die alone so far away from all of his friends and family back home. Enoch Eugene was closer in age to his younger sister, Ione, than to Dana, and the two siblings seemed to have a close relationship. Ione named one of her sons Enoch in honor of her deceased brother. I often wonder who Enoch Eugene would have become if he had made it home from the war.
Eugene Jenness Ladd
(1865-1948)
Eugene Jenness Ladd, my great-great grandfather, was born in Alton, New Hampshire. He was the only child of Reverend Enoch Place Ladd and Hannah Margaret Rand. The family relocated to Limerick, Maine when Eugene was a small child so the Reverend Ladd could preach in a church there. After the death of his father when Eugene was 9, his mother married the widower Joshua Holland, a man 20 years her senior. Eugene married Hattie Leighton in Calais, Maine in 1886, and by 1889 they were living in Westbrook, where Hattie gave birth to a son who apparently died in infancy. The couple had four additional children. After Hattie died from cancer in 1915, he married Agnes Kelley, a former nurse, in 1932. Eugene worked in factories, including the S.D. Warren Paper Company.
Those are the Eugenes that came before my dad. I didn't realize until I was captioning the pictures that the family relationships were the same on both sides of his family. He had a Turner and Ladd uncle, a Turner and Ladd granduncle, and a Turner and Ladd great-grandfather named Eugene. This family name will likely die out, unless one of my kids decides to use it for their future children….but (thankfully) I doubt they will, and I'm sure my dad would have been okay with that.
That's a lot of Eugene's... I worked for a man named Eugene who went by Gene, he was tough and smart, and a good boss. Thanks for sharing.