From the Dustbin: Amasa

Like many name nerds and people who expect to have more children, I keep a personal name list.

My list is a mishmash of family names, names I've happened across at work, names I've read on blogs and boards — really anything that has caught my attention as a possible name for future offspring. My list is fairly eclectic in terms of popularity, encompassing top-50 names (Lily, Samuel), names that are top 1,000 but not top 100 (Luna, Conrad), and names that are not in the top 1,000 (Oona, Pasquale).

But I never expected that one of the names on my boy list wasn't just out of the top 1,000, but not even on the extended SSA list. That name: Amasa (uh-MAY-suh).

Let's be clear — the extended SSA list is huge, encompassing nearly 34,000 names (about 20,000 for girls and 14,000 for boys). The list does not include very rare names (fewer than 5 uses) due to privacy concerns, but still, 5 uses is not a very high bar. Some of the names on this year's list include Ebenezer (for a girl), Nevaehtnes (Heavensent backwards), Stalin, and Zzyzx. My point is that a name has to be really, really unusual to get left off the list.

When I noticed that Amasa was not on the 2010 list, I was a bit surprised, but not totally shocked. Wondering when it fell into oblivion, I started working backward through the lists, first one year at a time, then five years at a time, then a decade at a time. But there was no Amasa in 2009. Or 1995. Or 1950. Or 1880.

With each new list, I thought for sure I'd see Amasa pop up — after all, it's a Biblical name (maybe not a hero, but not really a villain either), and there were plenty of Amasas in 19th-century America: Amasa Leland Stanford (founder of Stanford University), Amasa Lyman (influential Mormon), and half a dozen members of the House of Representatives during Reconstruction. I just thought it was a normal name — not common, for sure, but along the same lines as Asa or Amos or Abel or Abner any other of those short, A-, Biblical names. This is, perhaps, where my biases as an historian and a New Englander show through. There really were plenty of Amasas in New England in the early 19th century, so I thought it was just a regular old name.

I finally did locate Amasa in a few of the SSA lists — it pops up at the very bottom of the 1925, 1922, 1918, 1913, and 1890 lists, with 5-8 uses in each case. Very, very rare. This name doesn't need a revival; it needs an excavation.

It almost makes me a little sad that I can never use it, as my daughter's name starts with Am- and it would be too matchy. Someone else will have to take up the challenge. If you want a rare name — like, unicorn rare — that is nevertheless a name with a long and respectable history, is easy to spell (if perhaps a bit vowel-heavy), and would be right at home with Theodore and Walter,  Amasa would be a grand choice.