Home: Where Everyone Knows How to Pronounce Your Name
Growing up in a small Polish community outside of Chicago, it was common to have a name ending in "ski." My friends were Cindy Kalinowski and Jonnie Turkowski, so having the name Madeline Szostak didn't seem too difficult. It wasn't until I started my education at Georgia Tech that the professors would stop cold when reading the roster. I would wait as they got to "S" and say "here" when they paused. Even the name Madeline was unusual for the era. I was the only Madeline that I ever heard of besides the "Madeline" series of children's books. So when I got married, I eagerly took my husband's last name, Hoge. I thought having only four letters would decrease the room for pronunciation errors and misspellings. I was very wrong.
We moved a fair amount when we first got married. Boston, Cleveland, Michigan, and even Nebraska were short-lived and never felt like home. I got used to spelling our name, H-O-G-E since there weren't other Hoge's in the area (except for Cleveland). My first name wasn't a problem, although it was still a unique name even with all of our moves.
But then we moved to a suburb outside Cincinnati when my last name became problematic. Although I would state my name and then spell it out, the response would be to include a "u." When asked to check my name when I got my Ohio driver's license, it always contained a "u," even though I spelled it. I began to only spell the name instead of pronouncing it first, waiting for their articulation. The response would be "Hodge" or "Hoggie." Correcting it was futile since they would change the spelling accordingly. Our children could also not escape the errors even at their high school graduation. How difficult is it to annunciate four letters?
But we realized that famous people misstated our name, causing some confusion. Merril Hoge is a former professional American football player, now an ESPN announcer. He says his name as "Hodge" instead of Hoge. And then there is Tom Hoge, not my husband, but a professional golfer. He is called "Hoggie." Did these celebrities give up on announcers mispronouncing their name, or did they grow up stating it that way?
Hoge legend has it that two brothers back in Scotland became annoyed with the incorrect spellings, so one officially added the "u." The other tale is the quote, "Hogg by name and Hogg by nature, changed to Hoge by the legislature." We have documentation from Scotland that the original spelling was "Hogg." If you check Hoge's grammatical spelling online, you get various versions. So what is the correct?
When we first came to Southwest Virginia to visit Virginia Tech, the hotel we stayed at asked for the name on our reservation. I said, "Hoge." Her response was, which one? Several Hoges checked in that weekend which is highly unusual for us. We continued to our room and noticed the rooms were named. To my surprise, there was a Hoge room that listed all the descendants of John Hampton Hoge. That was just the beginning of learning the Hoge history.
As we established residency on the Hoge family farm, Belle-Hampton, we quickly became acquainted with various branches of Hoges. All descendants of General James Hoge, we have met the Daniel Howe Hoges, Joseph Haven Hoges, William Edward Hoge, and my husband's direct descendants, the James Fulton Hoge branch. Each lineage had some direct attachment to the farm from their ancestors who settled here in 1762. And they all spelled Hoge and pronounced the name the same.
Now that we are in our forever home, having a community pronounce our name correctly is reassuring. People recognize the name, know the family history, and often are related. We hear the stories and tall tales but have mutual ties with the enormous amount of history in the area. We often have family members reach out to us for a visit. An extraordinary history that spans seven generations defines our past, present, and future. To have a place "Where everyone knows your name" or how to pronounce it is a place to call home.
