The name I was given.
When I was born on Monday, December 28, 1959, at Rockingham Memorial Hospital in Harrisonburg, Virginia, my mother named me Donna Marie Duvall.
I never liked my name.
My mother, father, and younger brother all had family names. My father had been named after his father, and my brother was named after him. My mother and her sister were given feminine versions of their maternal grandfather’s name. My mother’s middle name was her mother’s middle name; her sister’s middle name was her mother’s first name. My name didn’t seem to mean anything. I felt excluded, as if I were somehow not worthy of a family name.
Some girls my parents knew in high school.
When I was in high school I asked my mother where my name came from. She told me she had named me after a girl she knew in high school named Dana Marie. When I was born she decided she liked “Donna” better than “Dana,” so Donna Marie it was. This girl wasn’t a good friend — just a girl with a name my mother liked.
That explanation didn’t help me feel any better about my name. I was named after some girl my mother knew in high school? The only thing worse would have been if she had let my father name me. He had wanted to name me Danielle, after a foreign exchange student he knew in high school.
I discover that it’s not that difficult to change your name.
The older I got, the more I disliked my name. When I was 37, my hair stylist told me she had completely changed her legal name because she didn’t like the one she had. I asked her how she did it, and she described a surprisingly easy process: submit some paperwork to the circuit court, pay $27.00, and get a judge to sign the order. Use the signed court order to get a new birth certificate, and submit the new birth certificate and a copy of the court order to change the name on government records and bank accounts.
That sounded doable, so I decided to go ahead with it — especially since I had started cringing every time I signed my name. The problem was that I didn’t know what wanted my new name to be. I had changed my last name when I got married the first time, reclaimed my maiden name when I got divorced, and didn’t change it when I got married a second time. It wasn’t just a new last name I wanted; I wanted to change the whole thing.
The search.
I looked around on the interwebs and to see what I could find about names. In addition to innumerable baby name websites, I found that a website for a society specializing in helping people choose “Balanced Names:” The Society of Kabalarians in Canada.
The Kabalarians take names seriously. They apply numerology to your birthdate and use the results to determine which names may help you become the best version of yourself. That sounded like a better plan than just picking a name out of the air, so I completed the order form, paid the fee, and waited for my name analysis.
Picking a new name.
I got my name analysis a few weeks later. It contained an analysis of my birth name as well as suggestions for first and last names that would help me move forward in life. I could also pick a middle name from the last name list if I wanted one.
Most of the names were derived from “regular” names but spelled differently, like “Hanaah” for Hannah “Karie-Marie” for Carrie Marie, and “Leighland” for Leland. Just to cover my bases, I paid the fee for a list that contained more conventional names that would work, like Judy or Rosemary.
Then I browsed through the lists and started writing out names. There were some I could rule out entirely, like “Bunni Daisey,” but there were lots of others to choose from. My new name had to sound like me, be easy to type, and result in a signature I liked.
After “trying on” a number of names, I selected
Janeson Tyrol Keeley
Janeson because I wanted a J name like my mother (Joann) and her sister (Jean) had.
Tyrol because of my Germanic heritage. Tyrol is a German-speaking area in western Austria. My Germanic ancestors actually came from Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, but I didn’t see the need to be all that geographically accurate.
Keeley because I liked it. When I told my aunt about my new name, she told me that my grandmother’s nickname in college was Keeley. “The Keeley Cure” was a treatment for alcoholism offered by the Keeley Institute in Nebraska, popular before Alcoholics Anonymous was developed. It wasn’t that my grandmother drank so much (she didn’t), but her last name was Cure. What group of college girls could resist the opportunity to call someone with the last name Cure, “Keeley Cure“?
Making the change.
Having made my decision, I typed up the petition and the order the judge would sign. I had to swear that I had never been convicted of a felony, wasn’t trying to avoid debt collectors, and wasn’t trying to commit fraud or evade prosecution for a crime. I dropped the documents off at the Circuit Court office with the $27.00 fee and waited.
As luck would have it, the judge decided that because I wasn’t changing my name for an obvious reason (e.g., to get my maiden name back), she would schedule a hearing in four weeks to hear my petition and, presumably, determine whether or not I was crazy. On the day of the hearing, I went in with an attorney friend who took the documents back to the judge, assured her that I knew what I was doing and what I would have to do, and persuaded her to sign it and cancel the hearing.
FAQs.
Q. Why did you change your name?
A. Part of the long answer is above. The rest of the long answer is that my father was a veterinarian, and a lot of people knew him. I didn’t like being known as “Dr. Duvall’s daughter.” The short answer is, “Because I didn’t like the one I had.”
Q. How do you pronounce your name?
A. JAN-i-son TEAR-ull KEE-lee. After being Janeson for more than 20 years, I’ve found that about 45% of people pronounce it correctly the first time, about 50% pronounce it “JANE-son,” and the remaining 5% don’t hear anything past “Janice.” I get the best results correcting people when I say my first name is pronounced: “like Allison, but different.” Some people see “Kelly” instead of “Keeley.” I have more trouble correcting that.
Q. How did people react to your name change?
A. My mother liked it. My father refused to call me Janeson unless my brother was with me. Other family members had trouble remembering, but finally got it. Pretty much everybody else accepted it immediately.
The rest of the story: The girl my mother knew in high school.
One day in the spring of 2012, about three years after my mother died, I was going through a list of blogs I followed to see which were still active. One of the blogs was by Beth Macy, a local newspaper columnist who has since become an investigative journalist and author. I scrolled down the page a bit and came across a post titled, “Journalism Ethics: Mystery desserts, midnight karma and the best story I never wrote.” That sounded interesting
As I scanned the post, I came across a paragraph that started:
“In 1949 a 16-year-old Eagle Scout killed a beautiful Jefferson High School cheerleader in the basement of a prominent church.”
My mother had been a junior at Jefferson High School in 1949. I googled roanoke murder 1949 eagle scout.
The first search result was a link to a newspaper article: “Defense Admits Eagle Scout Killed Girl in Fight in Church.” Under the headline were three pictures. The first two photos were of boys: Lee Scott and Jimmy Webb. The girl in the third picture was Dana Marie Weaver.
Lee Scott murdered Dana Marie in the parish kitchen of Christ Episcopal Church in Roanoke on Mother’s Day, May 8, 1949. His motive? Dana had made fun of Jimmy Webb, another student at Jefferson High School, who was a former boyfriend of hers and a person Lee Scott admired.
I was named after a murdered girl.
Dana Marie, Lee Scott, Jimmy Webb, and my mother, Joann Shoaf, were all juniors at Jefferson High School in May 1949. Of course, my mother would remember the name; the murder and subsequent trial, conviction, and pardon, were covered extensively in local and national newspapers. To this day people are still interested in the story, as evidenced by the recent publication of the only book I’ve ever seen written about the murder: FLOWERS FOR DANA: the 1949 Murder of Dana Marie Weaver in the “Star City” Roanoke, Virginia by Denise Tanaka.
Dana Marie Weaver was buried at Evergreen Burial Park in Roanoke. My mother’s family plot at the same cemetery had already starting to fill up when Dana was buried. My mother, her sister, and her parents are buried there now, as I will be when the time comes. I walk by Dana’s grave every once in a while to say hi.
I don’t know why my mother didn’t tell me she’d named me after a girl she knew in high school who had been murdered. Maybe she thought it would upset me. Maybe she didn’t want anyone in her family to know.
I wish she had told me. I wish I could ask her if she would have named me Donna Marie if Dana Marie Weaver hadn’t been murdered.
Defense Admits Eagle Scout Killed Girl in Fight in Church 29 Jun 1949, Wed St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri) Newspapers.com
Please note that the book links above are affiliate links from which I get a small commission if a purchase is made.