Floating around at the back of the news over president Bush’s service in the national guard are references to a Lt Colonel William Turnipseed.
The first time I saw the name, I wondered whether real life had somehow gotten entangled with a brassplated tin-general nemesis from an old McHale’s Navy episode, but apparently the guy actually exists. Which begs the question: What kind of name is Turnipseed? Is it unique to the American south, or does it have roots in old England, France or what? Are there lots of Turnipseeds in Alabama?
The only other person I’ve ever heard of called Turnipseed was an American.
He was the other guy in the car crash where James Dean Was killed.
Googling on it gave me 22,700 hits, a large portion of which appear to be in reference to individuals. I’ve only known one though, a college football player in the south 20 years ago.
The Mormon Church’s International Genealogical Index, the world’s largest vital records index, has one person from 18th century Germany with the surname Turnipseed. However, the record is vague and of dubious provenance. The only other place in the world the name shows up is in America, with firm event dates beginning in the 1820s in South Carolina and Virginia.
And Curly Chick wins today’s award for the most obscure trivia you’ll run into today. Wow.
Just so that you don’t think the name is limited to the South, we had a temp working here (southern CA) about a year or so ago with that same last name.
Thanks, Kalhoun!
Do you know what, I might just be tempted to get that printed onto a t-shirt to wear to DopeFests!!
Vanity, thy name is curly chick!
You’d be wise to do that. Dopewear can add so much to a get-together! Have at it!
We had an employee in our Nashville TN named Turnipseed. That was the only time I had ever seen the name until today, when they mentioned the name of the National Guard officer on the Today Show.
It sounds like a Hobbit name to me.
Well, the name exists in England, or at least on the Discworld. Terry Pratchett uses it as the last name of one of his characters in I-forget-which-book. I think one involving Unseen University.
The name Turnipseed does not appear anywhere in the 1881 census of Britain and Wales.
Sorry, that should be “England and Wales”.
A web based translator gives Steckrübensamen as the german for turnipseed. Google returns nothing on that, with or without the umlaut, so if the name comes from germany it must be rare there as well.
Wow curly chick, that was obscure!
Don’t know, but in looking at the James Dean guy, it seems “Turnupseed” is a more common spelling.
[QUOTE=Squink]
What kind of name is Turnipseed?QUOTE]
It’s Turnipseed’s name, sir.
–Cliffy, who has the facts at his fingertips.
Adrian Turnipseed, Soul Music .
I just looked the name up in the directory of the extremely large multinational corporation for which I work, and found two people, both in Georgia (the U.S. state), so that’s more anecdotal evidence that the name is Southern.
Surname Distribution: Turnipseed, 1990
Looks like as of 1990, they are concentrated in the South (Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia) with a small enclave in Idaho. But if you look at a dynamic animation of the spread of Turnipseeds from 1850 to 1990, you can see that they started out in Ohio, moved to Iowa, then Illinois and Kansas, before settling in the South.
It’s a neat tool, try it on your surname.
There’s a very prominent and well-known attorney in my town with that surname. In a newspaper article about him some years ago they mentioned the rather unusual name as being an anglicized version of the family’s original German name. I don’t recall what the original German name was, but the article said that a better translation would have been “rutabaga.”