“How am I going to pull this off?” This exact question I asked myself seconds after I received this project, in a one thousand words essay. I would have thought it a daunting and boring task at first, how can I write a 1000 word essay about my name. Personally, I did not think that I would be able to find hardly any information on the subject. I thought I knew enough about my name to begin with, it is mine, my own, and no one can take it from me; However, as my research developed, I began to be intrigued by my names, and now in the wake of the knowledge, I truly know what it means to be titled as Gatlin Ryan Williams. First visiting the library to find our mandatory book source, I had unveiled locations in the US bearing …show more content…
I had attempted to research it a bit before, but the immediate translation was an old English name for “Fellow, or kinsman”--how anticlimactic. After I dug deeper with this assignment, I began to uncover that there are several other possible names, mine being a modern derivative of one of these. Gaedling was the Old English name I had mentioned before, and the most common root name, it had always bothered me though, how the “ae” produces an entirely different pronunciation of the name than mine. On one of my sites, I had found a German name, Göttling, which produced a much similar pronunciation. This German name meant “with or of God” implying a very firm religious man (Behind the Name). I was quite pleased to learn so. Now I searched for demographics and popularity of my name. It is much more popular than it has ever been and is ranked #1175 of most popular boys’ names in the US (Mooseroots). Although I was unable to locate a celebrity with my first name, there is a few with my first name as their last name, most noticeably is a musical group known as the Gatlin brothers. Starting over 50 years ago, Larry, Rudy, and Steve Gatlin all started to sing their hearts out in their hometown of Abilene, Texas and have performed all over the US, even at the White House, and have won Grammys and performed on Broadway several