"And her name is Ima!"

         In a letter to his brother John, Jim Hogg announced the birth of his daughter. She was born July 10, 1882, and her father was delighted. But when Ima’s maternal grandfather, Colonel James Stinson, who lived fifteen miles away, “learned of his granddaughter’s name he came trotting to town as fast as he could to protest, but he was too late. The christening had taken place, and Ima I was to remain.” So said Ima herself, in many years later.

         Ima she did remain--but toward the end of her life (she died at 93) she achieved what a close friend called “her victory over her name.” But that is another story. For most of her life she was Ima, and she made the best of it. Her father had named her, and in her eyes James Stephen Hogg, Governor of Texas from 1890 to 1894, could do no wrong.

         According to Ima, her father named her to honor the memory of his late brother, Thomas Elisha Hogg. This brother was the author of  “The Fate of Marvin,” an epic poem about the Civil War. In it there was a heroine named Ima.

         (The poem’s Ima had a sister named Lelia, but never mind.)

According to James Stephen Hogg (who did not mention “The Fate of Marvin” when asked about his daughter’s name), it never occurred to him that “Ima” would not go well with “Hogg.” Said he: “The name ‘Ima’ was given to my daughter a few days after her birth and the singular application of it to the old, well-established, name of her paternal ancestors did not occur to any one until I had entered political life.”

Not true.