Where have all the Melvilles gone?

Not too many people track the travails of people named Melville, so I have taken it upon myself.  We are constantly questioned for our relationship to Herman Melville, a strangely unifying thread among for a surname all over Europe and the United States.

Ten years ago, I wrote a column about all the famous Melvilles, family history and the West Side car dealer with whom I shared a name. I’d gladly direct you to a link if subsequent owners of Suburban News Publications had not wiped out the online archive months after I left. (Update: You can read the original Where did all these Melvilles come from?)

Since I penned that column and left Columbus for Nashville, my surname interest has not diminished.

I discovered deeper ties to my own family through pictures of my grandfather Tom Melville, his twin brother and my great-grandfather wearing wool suits in Montana. They posed stoically in front of the Livingston train station, the post office at Mammoth Hot Springs and on a bare, grassy hillside in Yellowstone Country. Finding a trace of family in that rough, majestic land brought me even closer to Montana. It felt like generations of my family had found refuge there, a tradition I happily continue.

Montana even offered an unincorporated place called Melville. I took the lonely drive 20 miles north from Big Timber on U.S. 191 to see Melville, a farming crossroads along the Sweetgrass River east of the Crazy Mountains. 

Melville, East of Crazy – I always liked the way that sounded.  Only a post office and a tight-knit cluster of homes marked Melville beneath the jagged Crazy peaks.Once it boasted a hotel and several saloons; now Melville struggles onward like any number of subsistence settlements in the West.

No one has confused me for another Bill Melville since I migrated south. But I have kept tabs on other Melvilles. There’s a world of them out there … well, maybe just a broad continent and a few British Isles. Usually they turn up in obituaries. First came William G. Melville of Salt Lake City, a devout Catholic in Mormon Country. Then World War II vet William Melville of Massachusetts stuck out for having a son with the same name in Atlanta, where my parents now reside.

I have never fully shaken the ugliest obituary. A  Scottish Melville family of three (father William, wife Rachelle, son William) died in a three-car crash that killed five. A man went on a curve and crashed into the Melvilles and careened into another car, killing two young women. For some reason, go back to that story occasionally. It’s strange to let the deaths of people, with whom a name is my only connection, affect me.  Sometimes the dead speak louder than the living.

Sometimes Melville means quirky, like the Melville House in England, the kingdom’s most expensive repossessed home. Throughout its centuries, the Melville House switched from earl’s abode to quarters for Polish soldiers to a reform school.  Gregory Peck was already among my favorite actors when I found out his failed production company, which produced the original Cape Fear, was named Melville Productions, an ode to his second-most famous role.

Sometimes Melville means sweet. My girlfriend Nancy found a box of artisan chocolates at the Massachusetts-based Melville Candy Co.  The chocolate was quite lush, and the 35-year old company produces a variety of delectables. http://www.melvillecandycompany.com/About-Us_ep_7.html

For famous Melvilles, a new top dog has emerged,  and there’s no mistaking his name.

Spymaster Melville

William Melville headed the British Secret Service, which would later become MI5 (you all know MI5).  Some sources say he was known as “M” and influenced Ian Fleming and his choice of initial for James Bond’s boss. I couldn’t confirm this. Someone could have planted the story as a wiki-prank. But Spymaster Melville has the look of a man not afraid to wring out a suspect for a few drops of information.

On television, Sam Melville appeared on dozens of television shows from the 1960s to 1980s, including one stop as a jewel thief on the Dukes of Hazard, my favorite show as a kid.

If anything, having an actual famous namesake and chasing down other Melvilles provides a little comfort. Maybe I sift through the Internet for Melvilles because my own family has become a bit scattered. Weekend lunch every week became impossible long ago. I see my parents three or four times a year, mostly in Chattanooga. I see my sister at Christmas and if I fly to Seattle.

I think that pushed me to drive down to Brownsville. The chances of Dad and I venturing far on America’s highways grow dimmer with age. That might have been our last long trip. I try to get out to Seattle once a year because of my sister, and for Mother’s Day, Nancy and I surprised my mom and brother down in Georgia. In this life, other Melvilles come and go, but family does not.