What’s in a Name?- Discoveries from the 1940 census

Ever since I started reading History and Genealogy of the Jewetts of America and adding the names to my family tree software – Personal Ancestral File – my mom and I have decided that if you ever want an unusual name for your child, look in your family tree. On the Jewett line, I found name after name from the Bible – Joseph, Sarah, Mary, Isaac, the unusual Tryphena, Tryphosa and Jemima, etc., but also names like Temperance, Patience, Comfort, and Faith.  Now that’s just one line on my mother’s side.  On my father’s side, you’ll find names like Ursula Magdalena and Anna Susanna and Conrad Jürgen von der Wettern.
I started participating in the FamilySearch Indexing program a few years ago and I’m sure I’ve come across some interesting names, but until the 1940 census was released last month, I didn’t write any of them down.
Just the past couple of weeks, I’ve been blessed to discover some fantastic names: women’s names like Princess, Queen Ester, Omega – seriously – Sunshine Adams from Kentucky, and Anna Bullwinkel  - who would have thought that was a real name? – of South Carolina. Mary and her husband Herman Butt of South Carolina.  Then there are the men: father and son Pid and Arvid Lynch, and Shade Hunley, all from Kentucky; Val Jean Heiby of Ohio.
And then I started indexing some names from California.  The first two names on the first image:

Otto T and Helen C Pfefferkorn of California, who are you? Who are your descendants? What is your story? Otto was born in Massachusetts according to the census and was a chemist in the aviation industry. I don’t know why their names popped out at me save for the fact that they are so unusual and I wasn’t expecting to find a name so close to a seasoning written on a California census record.  Where does the surname come from? Does it actually mean “peppercorn” or something else?
And here I thought I was only anxious to find my grandparents’ names in Ohio, Kentucky and Maryland.
Is anyone else participating in this wonderful work? Indexing the 1940 census will help greatly in genealogy.  Did you have relatives you didn’t know about in 1940? Join in this wonderful work and find out for yourself!