another old violin's tale

Some thoughts on

The Violin Maker’s Secret
Evie Woods
Harper Collins 2026

Bookshop.org

Last year I read an old (1914) novel about a fictional Stradivarius violin following the fates of real and fictional players through the centuries of its lifetime. The author of that very romantic romp hiding behind a male pseudonym was Anna von Bonin (1856-1933).

Now I discovered a modern equivalent in the novel by Evie Woods (120 years younger than Anna von Bonin). It is a similarly wild romantic romp, but thankfully this time the violin is not a Stradivarius. It was made by a fictional Irish luthier called William Rathbone who died in 1841. He allegedly learned the craft from Thomas Perry (1738-1818) and knew Niccolo Paganini (1782-1840). Again, we're getting a mix of historic and fictional people through the two centuries of the violin's lifetime (1817-2025). There is a fantasy element in that the soul of the luthier's tragically deceased fiancee appears to have entered the violin, speaks to us as the voice of the instrument, and seems to have a magical influence on the romantic lives of the people who come near it.

Most of the plot is set in the present day (2025), however, with dramatic events unfolding after criminals steal the violin from an auction house but leave it at Heathrow airport where a baggage handler finds it and takes it home. A lot of the novel is also about personal baggage, so the protagonist's job is kind of an early hint to where we're going.

I've read this fairly swiftly and enjoyed it thanks to the subject matter matching my current interest in lutherie. I also happen to agree with the romantic statement being made here that string instruments can change lives (magically or otherwise) - can happen to all of us. I would also consider the author's earlier work The lost bookshop, for similar reasons (is it nominative determinism that she's drawn to objects made from trees?), but might skip the one about a bakery.

languages: the rise and fall

Languages evolve, diversify and become extinct, so they count as biology, right? A recent paper modelling the rise and fall of language diversity gave me a welcome excuse to revisit languages from an evolutionary perspective:

How languages evolve and die

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 17, 7 September 2026, Pages R925--R927

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(Unfortunately, this year's features will no longer become open access one year after publication - do contact me if you would like a PDF and the magic link has expired.)

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Last year's thread is here .

The 7,500 languages known today represent only a fraction of the language diversity that existed as recently as 2,000 years ago. (Photo: mrpbps/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).)

naming names

Reading (most of) a book about German family names I got inspired to update the list of names I had left unattended in the depths of my family history file for many years. The version I started from had 162 names, and the one I ended up with now (see this page) has 326 names, so yes, it's been neglected for too long.

Some of the most common German surnames.
Source: RossiLeone, Wikimedia Commons.

To give a rough indication of how close or distant in history these names are, I included the Kekule number of the last carrier (except for the immediate family up to the generation of my grandparents). By default, these carriers are all women. There are only a couple of cases where a male line took on a new name (eg after marrying into a farm and adopting the name of the farm, see Wolff). I've ignored the previous names in these cases as we typically don't know much about them. Similarly, I have also ignored the (speculative) previous life of Johann Dopheide, who may or may not have been identical with Jean d'Oppède. If he was, the family tree wins dozens of additional ancestors in the French nobility going back to the crusades, but that would be an entirely different story to the rest of my family history, so I'm tending to ignore that.

After adding the numbers for multiple occurrences of the same name, we end up with around 375 name lines ending in a woman, or 375 female ancestors whose maiden name we know. There are probably as many with only a first name and no known family name, and many more males, so these named women are a minority and it was an interesting experience to go through the list and acknowledge their existence one by one by copying over their number into the names list.

I also spotted quite a few cases where the same name occurs several times in the same geographic area without being a very common name like Schmidt or Mayer. I am planning to look at these cases again to find out if I can find evidence of shared ancestry between the women sharing those names.

The page serves as an index to blog entries where I have explored the origins of specific names (like eg Bitsch) and/or the biographies of several generations in an extended name line.

 

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My famlily history index pages: people -- surnames -- places -- migration events