Being a Stodghill isn't as exclusive as I thought

Until the Internet came along I believed that anyone bearing the name Stodghill was one of a select few. I had done some traveling in my day - 21 countries, all but a few American states - and never once encountered another Stodghill. While at Camp Polk, Louisiana in 1952 I read a newspaper account of a high school football game in which Bobo Stodghill played a major role. That was as close as I have come to meeting one.
But now that feeling of being somewhat exclusive has been blown to hell and gone. They're everywhere, these Stodghills, and more than a few of them are writers. Call up the name on Google and you're buried under an avalanche of 113,000 entries. Many are duplications, of course, but when it comes to being exclusive I could just as well be Smith or Jones.
My grandfather's family lived in and around the Ohio River towns of Aurora and Rising Sun, Indiana and Warsaw, Kentucky. I presumed that some of the clan followed the river to other places but I didn't know that a short distance downriver at the University of Louisville there is a Stodghill Endowed Professorship in Biomedical Research. Adele and HW set it up, I think.
So right off the bat I'm feeling a little inferior. Then I found that N. Stodghill has something to do with the study of The Effect of Ammonia on the Culturing of Penaeus Vannanei. Don't ask.
Ron Stodghill is a well-known writer who cranks out textbooks and such for Random House and writes for Time and other prestigious publications. Mark is a journalist in and around Duluth. Moving on to the Ivy League we find that Paul is associated with Cornell, Jack has a ph.D from Brown and Jeffrey graduated from Yale in 1981. Hey, I spent a few days at Rio Grande College myself.
Did you know there's a Stodghill Lake in Texas and a Stodghill Funeral Home in Fort Branch, Indiana? Neither did I.
Auburn University is urgently in need of information concerning Eunice Rebecca Stodghill, a very attractive lady who was a student there in 1917 when the school was known as A.P.I.
Mike has something to do with anabolic clabs. We all know what that means, don't we? Tom D. has an animal research foundation, Elena is a songwriter, Randy is in the music business, Alexis does voiceovers for commercials, William is a union president, Valene and Lance are filmographers among other things and Amelia is involved with movies and filmographs. Dr. Steven is a professor of pharmacology, Rod is another writer, but I'm not sure what Russell, Charles, Amy and just plain S. do.
All this is from the first eight pages of the hundreds, maybe thousands, on Google. Those eight provided far more information than I really wanted. Not one word, though, about Martin Stodghill having his nose bitten off in a street fight in Aurora. Street brawls were a common occurrence there a hundred years ago. Nor was there mention of the Stodghill hanged as a horse thief. Maybe those are covered in later pages.
Anyway, can you imagine what it would be like to have all these people in the same room at a Stodghill reunion? I don't want to think about it. I'd rather nurse my wounded pride.


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