3:57am September 17, 2014

I’m not actually a Baggs: The other part of my name change I wish I could’ve done different.

I’ve already written about the way I wish my first name could’ve gone differently. But I’m not sure I wrote about the way I wish my last name could’ve gone differently during the name change. I fully accept that the way I did it was the best way to do it, or I never would’ve forked over all that money to change it in the first place. I made sure that the name I picked was one I was willing to keep. But there’s this little bit of me that loves authenticity and therefore would’ve loved to restore my family’s actual last name.

It had been a puzzle to us for a long time. Family stories said that the Baggs family came from Scotland originally. But Baggs is not a Scottish name, it’s English and occasionally Irish. And that confused any of us who tried to look into the matter for a really long time. But none of us were so into genealogy that we were going to do the amount of work required to figure it out.

Then my dad’s cousin’s father died. And my dad’s cousin became obsessed with family history as a means of dealing with her father’s death. She dug into more records than anyone ever had before, and she solved the mystery of our Scottish ancestors: We aren’t Baggses at all.

Our last name was originally Beggs. It comes from a Gaelic word beag for “little” or “small of stature”, which means that probably somewhere along the line we are descended from a short Scottish guy. Known variants of Beggs: Beg, Bege, Beige, Begg, Bigg, Beggs, Biggs, Beggan, Beggin, Begge.

Anyway, some of the Beggses moved to Northern Ireland, and then around the time of the Revolution they moved to the USA. (One of them actually fought in the Revolution, was captured by the British, and escaped. Just to be clear: I’m not one of those people who thinks I’m cool because I have a relative who fought in the Revolution or something. I’m pretty sure his reasons had more to do with poverty than with political convictions anyway – the same reason they’d moved to Northern Ireland.) And at some point after the war was over, someone did a census. And someone misspelled Beggs as Baggs. And this one tiny branch of the Beggs family has been Baggs ever since.

I would have loved to revert my name to Beggs. But a friend pointed out that when speaking English instead of Gaelic, Beggs has some pretty unfortunate connotations. Especially when you’re someone who’s spent your entire adult life on government benefits. She said that the name Beggs could subtly prejudice people when my case comes up for review with food stamps or other benefits seen as “begging”.

And she’s right, as usual. Plus, we’ve been Baggs for at least 200 years now. So it’s not that bad. But I still wish I could’ve reverted back to our original name. Because I have a weird thing for accuracy about things like that — I almost always prefer the original versions of things. Not always, but almost always. And I think Beggs is a cool name, even if in English it looks like it means something about begging.

Hell, I think I’d like it even if it turned out that it really was an English occupational surname for a beggar — that would be just as interesting. I know a lot of people would be ashamed of that, but I think anything a name reveals about an ancestor is interesting. Even if it’s just that he was short. There are lots of names that mean short or small in all kinds of languages, because physical and personality characteristics are a really common way that surnames were originated. Other common ways were jobs, locations, and names of relatives. Like one of the possible origins of the real name Baggs, was someone who made bags or sacks for a living. Another origin of Baggs has to do with fighting.

Anyway, I’d have liked to have been able to be a Beggs again. But… nope. Baggs. Probably just as well, because all of my relatives are Baggses now and none of them are reverting, and we have hundreds of years of history now as Baggses. But still mildly disappointing.

I get the feeling that misspellings were fairly common. I mean first off there wasn’t a standardized spelling system back then to begin with. Second off a lot of people weren’t very literate. Third off… growing up everyone misspelled my family’s name. We got mail for Baggs, yes, but we also got mail for Braggs, Briggs, Biggs, Beggs, Buggs, Boggs, Bagg, Bogg, Bags, and probably some other ones I’m forgetting.

I remember someone in my family getting his draft information sent to him as Buggs, and my mom commenting that if he joined the army he’d be Private Buggs, which would not work well. Not that Baggs wasn’t a bad enough name for bullying and teasing material, but Buggs would be worse, and Private Buggs would be awful. I still wonder sometimes if the reason my grandfather went by his middle name was that his first name was Marine and he was in the Army. :-P

TL;DR: I thought about changing my last name to Beggs when I did ny name change, because it turns out that Beggs was my family’s name before it got misspelled on a census as Baggs. Beggs comes from the Gaelic word beag meaning short of stature, so I’m probably descended from a Scottish short guy somewhere way back in the depths of time. But I was persuaded that a person on lots of government benefits in a country where English rather than Gaelic is spoken, probably shouldn’t have a name that could be seen to imply begging if they could help it, lest it unconsciously prejudice someone when my food stamps come up for review or something. And I agreed. So I stuck with Baggs. Which is a perfectly good name. I just like the authenticity of Beggs.