This is interesting that no less than three separate people claiming descent from the original Turnipseed immigrants have discovered and commented on this long-dormant thread over the last ten years!
Turnipseed is almost certainly a literal translation of a German name which, in turn, exists in several versions of different truncation. German Wikipedia, for instance, lists a couple of prominent people named Rübsam and one prominent Rübensam.
Here’s some more trivia for this thread: The book Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads contains a recipe for Tunipseed Sisters’ White Loaf. The description of the recipe begins:
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I went to high school with an African American girl with the “Turnipseed” surname.
This thread was started in 2004, and restarted in 2010, 2017, and now in 2020. Does that set any kind of record for zombie threads?
IIRC, the literary work “Oliver Twist”, the newborn baby dropped off at the orphanage had no name, so the name “Twist” was made-up out of whole cloth.
Maybe the common Turnipseed ancestor had a similar origin.
I thought for sure this thread was being resurrected to say “What kind of a name is X Æ A-12 Musk?”
Turnipseed was one of the minor fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I’m shocked that I was the first one to mention this. On the rare occasions I come across “turnipseed,” Shakespeare is the only thing I think of.
Well, I’m a complete idiot — the fairy’s name was Mustardseed.
And her best buds were Peaseblossom, Cobweb, and Mote.
The Steward Sandwich thread has been revived more often, but I’m too lazy to look up when it was started.
The thread on the (as far as we know non-existent) alternate ending to the movie “Big” keeps getting revived every so often. Has to be at least a dozen times by now, if not more. It has a better claim than the Beatles for being better than Jesus in that regard.
Probably from Bree, where they all (Hobbits and big people too) tend to have vegetal related surnames (like Butterburr or Ferny).
Thread: Anyone Remember “Stewart Sandwiches”?
By your own count, looks like there have been 45 revivals so far.
You could say the turnip tree continues to bear fruit…
…er…the turnip vine? Am I close?
There was a Turnipseed family whose kids went to school with me when I was growing up in Des Moines, so it is indeed a real name, albeit a zombie one in this thread.
I think it’s a great name, and would never mock it. I think the world is a more interesting place with Turnipseeds in it!
I’ve been aware of the name as it pops up on lists of rare and unusual surnames.
Long live the Turnipseeds!
Whereas it never would have even occurred to me that it was unusual. I would have just assumed that the person had a distant ancestor who was a turnip farmer.
BTW, Tom Turnipseed, who was the attorney/poliction mentioned on the previous page, died just a few months ago.
When the segregation academies started sprouting up in the mid 1960s, this proud segregationist was the first president of the SCISA (South Carolina Independent Schools Association). When asked about race in private school admissions, he said at the time that race had nothing to do with admissions, and the only document that referred to race was on a form designed by the Feds. Later, after his conversion he was quite open about the segregation academies, saying (not in these exact words) “Duh! Of course they were built to keep the Blacks out.” From what I’ve been able to tell, documents relating to their founding just emphasized vague concepts as “to maintain local control of the curriculum” or some other code-speak.
Ike, Moth not Mote