How did "Truly" become a personal name?
(Miscellany)by Truly Donovan (truly@lunemere.com) My name is my mother's nickname. Her name was Etrulia, which she acquired from an aunt-by-marriage, Etrulia (a.k.a. Truly) Shattuck. Beyond that, the origins of the name are lost. Truly Shattuck, however, was a woman of some notoriety, having first come to public attention, according to family legend, when her mother, Jane, was tried and acquitted for having murdered her young daughter's seducer. This would have been in Northern California, perhaps the Bay Area, around the turn of the century, I would guess. At some point thereafter Truly went on the stage, and was supposedly a Floradora girl. Somehow (family legend is very murky about this), she got herself married to a staid Scottish lawyer from Michigan (during which time my mother was born and named for her), but that was not a very enduring union. During my mother's childhood, she was known to be running a chicken farm in California. Her last brush with notoriety, which we learned about from her obituary published in the Chicago Tribune, was when she was arrested for shoplifting a very expensive dress at Marshall Field. Her defense was that she needed to look for a job and hadn't anything to wear. Anyway, it sure beats being named for a fatuous character in a bad Ian Fleming children's book.
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