How did you get your name? Pt. 2

Growing up, my mother called me Rosie in public, at home she would also call me, Mejita or Cositas, all terms of endearments.  I grew up in a working class Hispanic family with a single mother and a grandmother.  My father was never in the picture when I was growing up.  I would see him when he came by to visit with my mother every once in a while.  He never came inside the house.  I was told later by my mother that it was a sign of respect to my grandmother, not to step in the house.  Even after my grandmother died years later, he would never step inside the house, just stand outside in the porch. 

The nicknames “Mejita” which means “little daughter” and “Cositas” which means “little things” in Spanish, were endearments that my mother used all the time.  They were nicknames that were commonly used within any Hispanic household.  My extended family also called me Rosie until I put a stop to it shortly after high school.  It took a little longer to get my Mother and my Grandmother to stop calling me Rosie and start calling me Rose.  Eventually they acquiesced.   Many of my cousins still call me Rosie when they see me and I gently remind them that I would prefer to be called Rose.

When I first started working on our family tree, I reviewed my birth certificate and realized that my middle name on the certificate was “Lara” and not “Marie”, as it is now.  I asked my mother why she had not put “Marie” as the middle name on the birth certificate.  My mother told me that at the time, she used her last name as my middle name by default.  It wasn’t until after I was baptized at Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic Church in Ventura, California, that my mother replaced “Lara” with “Marie”.  When I attended Kindergarten in Saticoy, California, I remember using my full name for the first time, Rose Marie Gonzales.

 

 

MyGenShare.com Website

I found this website through an article in the Deseret News by Barry J. Ewell called “Genealogy:  150 Questions to ask Family Members about their Lives.”  Published online on Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2014, 8:00 a.m. MST.   It is a great article.  Mr. Ewell is author of "Family Treasures: 15 Lessons, Tips and Tricks for Discovering your Family History," on Facebook and founder of MyGenShare.com, an educational website for genealogy and family history.  

 Southern California Genealogy Society Jamboree

Teach Me Genealogy: "To forget one's ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root." --Chinese proverb

How did you get your name?

“Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to." --John Ed Pearce

This quote is actually very true.  When we are children, we so much want to grow up and be independent of our parents.  When my mother died in 2012, with a sad heart, we turned the house over to the bank.  We had encouraged my mother to get a reverse mortgage.  We had bought the house and had lived there since 1974.  I had been the one to talk my mom into doing a reverse mortgage. She needed the income to live on, since her social security and pension were barely supporting her.  At the time, I had felt it would be a help.  Now I wished we could have held on to the house, maybe live in it for awhile until we retired and could not handle the yard anymore.  As the quote suggests, maybe I am going to grow old wanting to get back to the life I was living when I left as a college student.

My husband and I finally drove by the house the other day.  It was fixed up with stucco and fresh paint.  As far as we could see, new window panes and front door. People were living in it.  It was as it should be.  A family living their lives in an updated house.  Happy and content as we had once been when we lived there.  Looking at the house, I briefly missed the life I had once lived, but this is 2014.  I still have more life to live and more memories to make.  It's too early for regrets.

Teach Me Genealogy Website

There is a website that I found called, Teach Me Genealogy, that looks very intriguing.   They are doing a series called, "52 Weeks of Genealogy."  They are offering suggestions on what people can do to make genealogy interesting every week of the year.   I thought that it would be helpful for me and interesting for you, if I explored the many suggestions they make.  I see this as a way to prod me to write.   

How did I get my name?

My mother had once told me that I had my name, Rose, because she couldn't spell the one she really wanted. My mother had wanted to name me Charlotte, after my father Charlie.  

I had been born, in what is now called, the  Ventura County Medical Center, in Ventura, California.  The family was living in the Saticoy area of Ventura County.  It was a very small town.  My mother and grandmother were living in one of the houses.  These homes were rented by the people who worked for the Growers.  I believe that she was working in the packing house instead of out with the field workers, which also lived nearby.  

She had asked for help in spelling the new name for the birth certificate but no one knew how to spell, "Charlotte".  Her thought had been if she had named me Charlotte, the family would call me Charlie for short.  Unfortunately, no such luck.  All the nurses could suggest and spell was "Rose."  So that is why my name is Rose.

  

Southern California Genealogy Society Jamboree