Last week I was in Illinois visiting some friends on my way home from picking up a new car. According to my grandfather I was only 20 miles or so from the cemetery where some of my extended Nowlin family is buried. Now, this knowledge is enlightening for me, because it is the first time in my 27.6 years that I have had my "long lost" Nowlin relatives within my own reach. I call them "long lost" because around the time my father (the middle of three children) was three years old, his father apparently made a break from the Nowlin family and changed the pronunciation from N-ow-lin (as in c-ow) to N-oe-lin (as in f-oe).



Thus, on the final leg of the trip, I traveled 20 miles to Greenburg, IL, to the Mount Auburn Cemetery to look for the Nowlin grave stones. After 20-30 minutes of searching I found some of whose names I recognized, but were not confirmed as relatives. I continued for another ten minutes after this as I worked my way back toward my car. Strangely, to my surprise, I missed the fact that I had apparently parked within 20 feet of two more Nowlin stones that I had not seen. I was very glad to have found them, because the names on these two immediately rung bells. I got on my cell phone and called my dad in California to confirm that in fact these were my great-grand parents and great aunt and uncle. I was suddenly struck at awe that I was, for the first time, standing right were some N-ow-lin relatives had stood. I was in the stomping grounds of the ancestors who gave me my last name. I felt almost like an adopted person who had found their birth parents--except for that this was held in common with my immediate uncles (and father) who have had general awareness of this distant heritage.



Apparently, my uncle Chris Nowlin has referred to his father (my grandfather) with the old pronunciation. He once spoke to his daughter (my cousin) about grandpa N-ow-lin, rather than N-oe-lin, as I had always known him. He subsequently looked at me and mentioned that the "name is really N-ow-lin." This struck interest in my search for this Nowlin heritage. I remembered that in my teen years I considered introducing myself by the old pronunciation once I entered full adulthood. This I never did. Yet, I find that when I spell my name to someone over the phone, the old pronunciation sounds like it is spelled; the current pronunciation makes space for all kinds of spelling errors. Thus, with the history of the Nowlin surname and the subsequent difficulty related to its variations, I more and more seldomly correct people if they pronounce it the old way (since according to my uncle the old pronunciation 'is the way it really is.'