To get ready spiritually for the upcoming Christmas season, I turned to the Book of Matthew (that’s in the Bible) to read again about the birth of Jesus. Old Matt starts out with a genealogy of Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and it just so happens that I had been involved not that long ago with updating our own family’s genealogy, so I paid more attention to what I was reading than I have ever done before, I must confess.

See, as the eldest son of a youngest son, I fell heir to the old Neill Family Bible, dating back to the 1840s. My great-granddaddy Gilbreath Falls Neill began recording the births, marriages, baptisms, and deaths of family members ‘way back then, even the births of slaves.

This is an aside, but I have read that many Southern slave-owners freed their slaves voluntarily well before the War Between the States, including Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, two of the Confederacy’s top generals.  

Apparently, so did Colonel Neill, for after 1849, no slave births are recorded, although everyone else’s affairs are, just like before. Only conclusion that I can come to is, Great-Granddad freed his slaves, too. By the time that War began, only 5 percent of Southerners owned slaves, and only 5 percent of those owned more than two, I’ve read.

At any rate, having recorded a couple of births (of my grandsons), a couple of marriages (son & nephew), and a couple of deaths during the past year or so in our own Family Bible, I took more careful note of the “Begats” that Matthew was listing: names like Aminadab, Rehoboam, Jehoshaphat, and Zerubbabel, along with Joseph, of course. I had to work on the pronunciation of most of the names, and Jacob was the only name repeated, but that was forty generations apart.

In our Family Bible, every generation has a Robert Neill, as well as a John and a Sam. Most have a William. My own brother is Samuel William, matter of fact. In one litter, the second family of Great Granddaddy Gilbreath Falls (his first wife died during the War) there are two Roberts, one having died as a youngster, so they named a subsequent son Robert Neill II, who according to my Daddy (Big Robert) was called “Buddy Bob” by the family.

Since my daddy was his namesake, Buddy Bob wrote him letters as he traveled the West in the lawman business, apparently being quick on the draw. He died in a mining camp somewhere in Montana, no one was sure how. He probably got slow on the draw.

I grew up with the finest group of friends who were sons of the finest group of friends – men and women. The Dead Duck Club was composed of Big Dave, Big Robert, Big John, Uncle Sam, Uncle Shag, and Mi’ter Mo’, as far as what we kids called our elders, and of course their wives, our mothers – but my point is, we were Little John, Little Dave, Little Bob.  

Farming close to us were Big Jimmy and Jimmy Junior.  In other words, during that period, family names got passed down, and Big Robert got his nose out of joint a little when we named our son Adam. As far as anyone knew, there had never been an Adam Neill, and Daddy favored Robert III, calling the kid Rob, or Robby, or even Buddy Bob; maybe even Bubba!

Skipping forty generations before re-using a name was not an option in my youth, yet in Matthew’s Gospel, there’s not a single Little Salathiel, or Bubba Eliud, or Joram Junior. It’s like they used a name back then until the original guy used it up!  I grew up with boys named Buster, Buddy, Bud, and Bubba, as well as Red, Skeeter, Bird, and Yogi, then played at Ole Miss with guys named Possum, Catfish, Mule, Bookie, Duck, Hoss, and Bootsey, among others.

Can you imagine a coach yelling, “Eliakim BarAbiud, block that end!”

Undoubtedly, the men in the Bible had nicknames too: Simon Peter was probably called Rocky, and James the Less was really Shorty, I bet. The Gospel writers just dressed it up for posterity. But surely there was a Bubba somewhere, if we mere mortals just knew the original Hebrew!