What's in a name?

This past weekend at Phinehas' dedication the pastor introduced him as Phinehas Cooper "crow-shay". At this there was a collective gasp in the pew. This pastor had no way of knowing that he had inadvertently stumbled over an old 'secret'. That for nearly 20 years we had been the 'crow-shays' and had finally reclaimed our rightful name only recently. It was so surprising it was nearly funny.

When I was a young bride and moved with my new husband 400 miles from family and friends to what was then the wilds of NW Iowa, and we began meeting people and making friends we were often asked how our last name was pronounced. (the spelling of it certainly didn't give any clues) Since it wasn't my name to begin with I always deferred to my husband (though I think he might remember it differently.) He told people to pronounce it just like the thing you do with two needles: crochet. I think he was trying to make it easy on people. That "crow-she" was too much of a mouth full. Too hard to reconcile with the actual spelling of the name. At any rate, once people started to call us 'crow-shay' there was no going back. To all my students I was Mrs. Crow-shay. (although once, some poor confused child called me Mrs. Knitting) Our kids must have wondered why our name was different from their paternal grandparents, but none of them ever asked. And then we moved. At last! We had a chance to right all wrongs. By now we knew that people really could handle unusual name spellings with difficult pronunciations. So at school, in town, Ron's work, every where we told people we were really the 'crow-she's'. And it worked. Though I admit there was a bit of cross confusion at my work place since I didn't change jobs only towns. But then we moved again. and again. and again. And everywhere we are the Crow-she's without one bit of difficulty....well. Unless they are friends from that first place. They haven't had the heart to change our name. And it actually helps us identify some people. We know if we get called 'crow-shay' they are friends from Webb. (helps narrow the list of friends down if we don't remember their faces. So back to Phinehas' pastor and the slip he made. It made us wonder if he had Webb roots, or if we were right all along. Crow-she was too difficult to handle. We should have stuck with Crow-shay!