Will you watch Warren this weekend?
The Berkshire Hathaway Annual meeting, featuring Omaha’s most famous billionaire, Warren Buffett, convenes Saturday at the Century Link Center.
Warren’s an English surname with two origins. Most Warren families had ancestors who came from La Varenne in Normandy. The place name is Gaulish for “sandy soil.”
Other Warren families (along with Warings and Guerins) had ancestors named Warin or Garin, Norman versions of a Germanic word meaning “guard.”
Warren became a first name in the 1700s. In the United States, this was largely in honor of Joseph Warren (1741-1775), a Boston physician who became president of Massachusetts’ Provincial Congress after the colony declared independence in 1774. At the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, Warren, a major general, insisted on fighting in the front lines. He was killed, and British soldiers hacked his body beyond recognition.
Warren’s death inspired America’s revolutionary soldiers. Fourteen states (including Iowa and Missouri) have a Warren County named for him.
American parents also named thousands of sons after Warren. In the 1850 census, the first to list all residents by name, 12,997 Americans had Warren as a first name. In Britain in 1851, there were only 314, though the countries had about the same population.
One of Warren’s many namesakes was Warren Gamaliel Bancroft, born in New York in 1835. He later became a respected Methodist minister in Ohio and Wisconsin.
Bancroft and his wife, Sarah, had only daughters. Perhaps that was partly why Sarah’s nephew, G. Tryon Harding of Blooming Grove, Ohio, named his first son Warren Gamaliel Harding in 1865.
In 1880, Warren ranked 89th and slowly declined from there until in 1906 it bottomed out at 144.
It was 108th in 1914, the year Warren Harding was elected to the United States Senate from Ohio, becoming a national leader of the Republican Party.
When Harding was elected president in 1920, the name exploded, with 7,798 babies named Warren in 1921, ranking it 24th.
When Warren Buffett was born in Omaha in 1930, he was one of 2,008 Warrens arriving that year.
The name continued to slowly fall until 1961, when it was bumped up by Warren Beatty’s Golden Globe-nominated performance in “Splendor in the Grass.” Though its decline resumed in 1964, Beatty’s fame helped keep Warren among the top 200 until 1972.
Warren bottomed out in 2005 at 551st place, when 434 were born. By 2012, it inched up with 574 newborn Warrens, ranking it 473rd.
Buffett’s well-publicized friendship with Bill Gates, unorthodox views on taxing the rich, and superstar financial guru fame combine to make him one of the most popular 83-year-olds with younger Americans. Perhaps some of those new little Warrens are also being named after the Betty White of billionaires.
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