Name Origins: Lavina

Name Origins by Julie Helen Otto

LAVINIA (f): Female form of a Roman family name. In Roman legend, Lavinia was the daughter of King Latinus, king of Latium [the area around Rome: modern Lazio]. She married the Trojan newcomer Aeneas, hero of Vergil's Aeneid. Her name springs from the same root as the ancient city of Lavinium, about seventeen miles south of Rome. In Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's bloodiest play, the eponymous hero has a daughter by this name (Clarence L. Barnhart, William D. Halsey et al., The New Century Cyclopedia of Names, 3 vols. [New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1954], 2:2399). Familiar forms often seen in New England are VINEY or VINNY. Lavinia Dickinson (1833-1899) of Amherst, Mass., sister of the poet Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830-1886), arranged for publication of Emily's poems after the poet's death. In the 1850 census, 5,195 women named Lavinia were enumerated. The 1940 census listed 4,436 women with that name. In the PBS series Downton Abbey there was the Fiance of Matthew.  Her name was Lavina. Images from google search:

New England Heritage

Where does your New England Heritage take you?

Since I grew up never knowing of my New England Heritage I did not know I had a connection to the place until 2008.  

 That was an explosive year since I had received massive information through Ancestry.com.

I have been on definite ancestor drive since then.  Every new piece of information I gather is a new part of my self I did not know I had before.

I love to learn their major & minor stories of their lives.

 The deeper I dig into my ancestors lives and find out how resilient they were to many challenges they faced. 

 I then relize that our lives of those of us living we face challenges every day as well.  

 So leave a journal or something your descendants can find out about you personally.