THE OLD MAN
OF THE MOUNTAIN
As a genuine country lawyer, I have been called upon many times to examine public records for the purposes of rendering an opinion as to legal title to real estate. It’s called “searching a title” and, while more modern practices have finally crept up from the city and through Franconia Notch, so that most people examining the records are now paraprofessionals, I still get my hands dirty and look them up myself. It is a form of original historical research that I enjoy, and I know that I am in closer touch with my surroundings and their history for engaging in this exercise.
The process involves finding all the recorded instruments relevant to a particular piece of property, and this is accomplished through the use of indices that catalog all the people who have been party to all the documents recorded in each county’s real estate office. I suppose I have always been intrigued by names, but this exercise tends to focus that interest. I wonder about the nineteenth century women named Everesta and Monumenta; names given, I am sure, by parents impressed with the miracle of birth and the tremendous importance of this new life they had created, but never suspecting the image of their daughter that it would conjure up a hundred years later.
In the old days, literacy was not as common as it is today, and many people spelled their names differently on different occasions. My recognition of this phenomenon gave life to a sterile concept I had learned in law school and promptly forgotten, the doctrine of idem sonans, loosely translated from the Latin: “sounding the same.”
If you are checking Simmonds, you had better look up Simmons and even Simons. Hibbard and Hubbard might be used interchangeably. Gagne could become Gonyer, St. Clair might be Anglicized to Sinclair. I was intrigued to find the ultimate application of this doctrine when I found property deeded to Pierre Boisvert but deeded out half a century later by Peter Greenwood, French and English labels for the same person. I wondered if the Anglicization of his name had been accompanied by an acculturation of the man. Things like this added a bit of challenge to a job that many lawyers regard as a boring distraction from their more important business.
But even outside of the vault containing the real estate records, I have a couple of other anecdotes about names that you might enjoy.
Country lawyers tend to engage in general practice, very general at the outset, although they will usually specialize a bit as time goes on. So early in my career I found myself occasionally representing young reprobates in juvenile court. One of my regular clients was an incorrigible, but essentially harmless young man - let’s call him Hubert E. Clement, III. I thought of the pride that must have accompanied the christening of this fellow with a well-used family name, and the disappointment he must have come to embody.
Anyway, after a while I was called for an appointment by his parents. They wanted me to prepare wills for them. When we met, I was pleased to find quiet, thrifty country folk, subscribers to the old values, and I wondered what had happened with their son.
I set about recording the salient information: names, addresses, both of them and their kin. I told them that of course I knew their son, Hubert E. Clement, III. So I surmised that his father who sat before me must be Hubert E. Clement, Jr., right?
“Nope. I’m Hubert E. Clement, Sr.,” he corrected me.
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “If you are Hubert E. Clement, Sr., and your son is Hubert E. Clement, III, then who is Hubert E. Clement, Jr.?” I asked.
For a moment I expected a tale of tragedy from the couple before me. Perhaps Hubert, Jr. had died in infancy and so when the young man I knew as Hubert, III came along they sought to reincarnate their lost son in his person and gave him the same name.
The answer was simpler than that. “Well,” my client answered. “I used to be Hubert E. Clement, Jr. and my father was Hubert E. Clement, Sr. But then he died and I figured, ‘Why can’t I be Hubert E. Clement, Sr.?’ So I have been Hubert E. Clement, Sr. for quite a few years now.”
Why not indeed. Idem sonans. Q.E.D.
I had another old client, one I truly felt privileged to know, not to mention serve as his lawyer. He had been a highly successful farmer in town, on a homestead that through previous generations of his family had defied successful agricultural pursuits until he came along. He was very intelligent, self-taught, full of energy even when I knew him in his 80’s. He had been a Town Father, serving his community in many ways for half a century or more. Let’s call him Merrill Herbert.
The first time he came to me, it was because of my willingness to dive into the old records and figure out knotty real estate problems. He owned a piece of property separate from the ancestral homestead farm, and he wanted to give it to his son. The problem was that he had acquired the property piecemeal over many years, so he had five different deeds that went to create his title. To complicate matters further, the property had been bifurcated by the interstate highway built through the area in the late 50’s, and he had conveyed off various pieces. What he planned to give his son was what was left over, but how to describe it after the property had been sliced and diced this way?
He handed over the deeds for my review. I went through them one by one. “Let’s see,” I said. “Here is a deed to you from Joseph Smith.”
“Ayuh,” he agreed. “That’s my wife’s brother.”
“OK.” I went on to the next one. “Now here is a deed to you from Andrew Jones.”
“Ayuh,” he answered. “That was my grandfather on my mother’s side.”
“Fine. Next we have one from Julia Brown.”
“Ayuh,” he replied. That’s my sister.”
“Very good. And this one is from someone named James Black.”
“Ayuh,” affirmed my client, Merrill Herbert. “That would be my uncle, my mother’s brother.”
Reaching for the last one, I said “Now this one is from Alexander Herbert. What relation was he?
“Alexander Herbert? he rejoined. “No relation.”
