One Hundredth Post!

As you may be able to tell from the volume of posting today, I turned in my final papers at 10:00 this morning and am (almost) free for the summer. I have a statistics exam tomorrow morning, but I'm not feeling very anxious about it. I would rather pay some attention to this neglected blog than organize my notes on logarithmic regression.

In celebration, I present another great 17th-century name:

Darkes Mesenger.

Now, I know that this is probably just a colloquial spelling of "Dorcas" and therefore not very exciting, but I still like it. The Windsor, Connecticut church records document the birth of "Darkes Mesenger" on September 23, 1650. Darkes and her younger siblings, Nathaniel and Deliverance, were the children of Edward Mesenger and his unnamed wife.

I got pretty excited when I came across this name. What was going on in Windsor, with two little girls named Jezebel (Jezabel Wilson b. 1673 and Jesabel Hoskins b. 1657) and one named Darkes Mesenger? I later realized that Darkes was probably the more prosaic "Dorcas," rather than a harbinger of the apocalypse.

Interestingly enough, Dorcas was a fairly common name in 17th-century Massachusetts, but Darkes Mesenger was the only Dorcas born in Windsor between 1636 and 1680. Ok, maybe that's not so interesting.