nancynall.com » The Nalls.

The Nalls.

Before I started this blog, I thought I was the only Nancy Nall in the known uni­verse. It’s such an odd­ball name, after all — who other than my par­ents would choose it for an inno­cent girl baby? It turns out that I’m not, of course; since the Google came around I have vir­tu­ally “met” at least a dozen rel­a­tives (all Nalls in the U.S. go back to a sin­gle ances­tor, so we’re all at least dis­tantly related), includ­ing a cou­ple of Nan­cys. But this e-mail may be the best ever:

are you by any chance THE tal­ented, nancy nall who starred on the Riley High School stage in Fire­fly, among many other mem­o­rable per­for­mances?  if so, though you may not remem­ber, I played oppo­site you in that one. 

 No. But if I were, I would cer­tainly remem­ber my co-star. 

16 responses to
“The Nalls.”

  1. brian stouder said on September 7th, 2007 at 11:44 am

    ‘The Tal­ented Nancy Nall’ can­not help but be head and shoul­ders bet­ter than Mr Rip­ley!

  2. Connie said on September 7th, 2007 at 11:55 am

    I would have thought I was the only Con­nie Ozinga as well. But if you google my name, you will find that a Con­nie Ozinga in Mary­land passed her sea­man­ship course. If you add my mid­dle name, Jo, I have zil­lions of google pages, mostly due to things like years worth of monthly board meet­ing min­utes. There are not that many Ozin­gas in the entire coun­try.

  3. Mindy said on September 7th, 2007 at 11:55 am

    I once Googled my hus­band and came up with three other guys who have his name with wives who have my name. Two of the cou­ples live in Min­neapo­lis. I bet they get each other’s phone calls all the time.

  4. Danny said on September 7th, 2007 at 12:08 pm

    Imag­ine my aston­ish­ment when I found out I was not the only Danny Smith.

  5. deb said on September 7th, 2007 at 12:18 pm

    i have a dop­pel­ganger who’s a bad artist and another–although i guess it could be the same woman–who’s a dog breeder. give you a lit­tle jolt to google your­self and find the word “bitches” right next to your name.

  6. LA mary said on September 7th, 2007 at 12:54 pm

    At least once a day some­one tells me they either know another Mary Poole or they think they already know me. It’s one of those basic sound­ing names. My maiden name was a nice weird Frisian name, likes Connie’s is, and no one ever said they rec­og­nized that one.

  7. John said on September 7th, 2007 at 1:08 pm

    Just a slight cor­rec­tion (since you prob­a­bly got the it from me), “vir­tu­ally all Nalls in the U.S. go back to a sin­gle ances­tor”. There are a few fam­i­lies started from dif­fer­ent immi­grants and a cou­ple of name changes (from Noll, Noul or Neal, for exam­ple).

    I truly hope you answered that you are The Tal­ented Nancy Nall, but not the afore­men­tioned actress.

  8. Connie said on September 7th, 2007 at 2:11 pm

    LA mary, I love it when peo­ple rec­og­nize my name as a “nice weird Frisian name.” That is the rea­son I didn’t change my name when I mar­ried.

  9. brian stouder said on September 7th, 2007 at 2:42 pm

    Way way way (waaaaaay) back in kinder­garten, I sat next to a girl named Brighetta Ohzie – prob­a­bly spelling that wrong, but her name was pro­nounced brigee­tah (empha­sis on the ‘gee’) ohzee. A very nice per­son, and I think her par­ents spoke Ger­man

  10. Jen said on September 7th, 2007 at 3:53 pm

    My dop­pel­ganger is a cousin by mar­riage, and “bor­rowed” my credit rat­ing to buy her house. Gotta love those free market-driven credit bureaus and their com­mit­ment to accu­racy.

  11. Linda said on September 7th, 2007 at 5:08 pm

    Jen, you got off easy. When I tried to refi­nance my house, they mixed up my credit records with some­one with a sim­i­lar first name, born on the same day, in the same home­town, with a SS num­ber 1 digit off from mine, who had bad paper every­where. It took months to straighten it out, and one of the credit bureaus had the nerve to scold ME to be care­ful.

    And googling my name only reminds me of how many peo­ple with the same name are smarter and more accom­plished than me.

  12. MichaelG said on September 7th, 2007 at 6:54 pm

    There have been at least three other Michael Gold­ens who worked for the State of CA. Wildest of all is that there was one with the same mid­dle ini­tial who worked in the same unit where I work doing the same thing that I do. We used to call him my dad. He retired sev­eral years ago. Imag­ine the prob­lems with net­work log ons, email, mes­sages, travel claims, etc., etc. It was end­less. Worse still was that he was a big­oted, racist SOB. They used to call me the ‘good Michael G’ and he was the ‘bad’ one. I still get mes­sages and mail for the guy. Our peo­ple came from the same area in the west of Ire­land so I assume we’re related some­where way back. What a trip that was. I also ended up hav­ing to fix some jobs that he had fu I mean, messed up. I felt like a fool try­ing to explain how it wasn’t my fault. I’m lucky so far to not have had any credit or ID prob­lems because of any of the oth­ers.

  13. Jen said on September 8th, 2007 at 8:50 am

    Linda: I can actu­ally relate. Same 1st/last name, same year of birth, and all her bad paper got mixed up in my file. Her FICO jumped 200 pts, and mine went down 300. I found out when my employer (a finan­cial insti­tu­tion) sent a VP to give me the “bad kid” talk for not meet­ing con­di­tions of employ­ment. QUITE the rude awak­en­ing. At least it only took 6 months to fix…

    http://​www​.annu​al​cred​itre​port​.com

  14. Julie Robinson said on September 8th, 2007 at 9:52 am

    I grew up with a very uncom­mon name, Pig­ott; go ahead and take a minute to imag­ine the pos­si­bil­i­ties on the play­ground. Even so, when we were mar­ried I didn’t imme­di­ately change my name; that didn’t hap­pen until we were start­ing a fam­ily and I came to feel we should all share a name.

    There still isn’t a good solu­tion to this–who gives up their fam­ily name, do you just pick a new name and make both sides mad? We have friends who both hyphen­ated, def­i­nitely the most equi­table, but they both have unusally spelled and pro­nounced names. What hap­pens when their boys marry? Espe­cially if they find women who also have two last names.

    They shouldn’t have any credit switch prob­lems, though.

  15. ashley said on September 9th, 2007 at 11:27 am

  16. Bev said on September 9th, 2007 at 7:28 pm

    I found your blog some months ago while try­ing to find out who the heck Red Tra­bue was. I too, won­dered if you were Nancy Nall from Riley H.S. – whose lit­tle brother was my first “boy friend, not boyfriend” as I said back in first grade. I fig­ured out quickly you were too young to be ‘Riley Nancy’ but have been hap­pily read­ing your blog ever since. Alas, I still don’t know why they name roads and parks after Red Tra­bue…