An Uncommon Name

When my mother, Ramona, was young, her best friend was named Erlinda. They liked each other so much that they told each other that when they married and had girls they would name them for each other.  My mother kept her part of the bargain by naming me Erlinda.  I do not know if the friend Erlinda ever named her daughter (if she had a daughter), Ramona.

I do know that I had a friend in Greeley named Ramona.  Years later she told me she had named her daughter, Erlinda.

Dad liked to tell the story that when I was born he told my mother, "We have a daughter, should we name her Martha, er Jenny, er Sally er Linda? " My mother had replied,  "Er Linda."

However my name came about, not too many had my name.  I went through school being the only Erlinda.  Teachers always commented on how different my name was and that they had never heard it before.  I was always being asked to spell my name and I would just say, "Linda, with an er in front of it." My brother liked to say that "Linda" meant beautiful and "Er" meant not!

When I became friends with some Mexican friends they told me that my name was a common Spanish name but spelled Herlinda.  In my seventy plus years, I have seen about ten Erlinda's and they were all Hispanic women. When any foreign Hispanic person would write my name they always spelled it Herlinda with a different pronunciation, more like AirLinda.

One day I was at the grocery store and the clerk looked at my check and said, "My mother's name is Erlinda also."  I told her that was odd because not too many persons had that name.  The clerk nodded and said, "I thought my mother was the only one with that name. I am surprised to see someone else with the name Erlinda."

A few weeks later I happened to be at the dentist's office and the woman cleaning my teeth remarked, "You and my mother have the same name.  She is an Erlinda also."

It seems that my uncommon name is more common than I thought! I was curious so I looked on the Internet and found out that in 1928 there were 58 babies named Erlinda across the United States. In 1959 in California there were 19 girls born and named Erlinda. Since 1880 to 2011 Social Security Administration had 4,597 listed as Erlinda in the United States!

"From our ancestors come our names,

but from our virtues, our honors." Proverb