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Having recently added more published authors from the Machen family — parents of the famous John Gresham Machen — it seems fitting to introduce them to our readers by way of this extract on how to pronounce that intriguing last name. Charles E. Funk (of the family which owned Funk & Wagnall) published What’s the Name, Please? (1938), which is a handy little guide to such matters, and it includes Machen.
Funk writes:
Machen, Arthur — author — “My name (of Scottish origin) is pronounced mack’en to rime with blacken. Maytshen, mayken, masken are incorrect.” But see the next entry.
J. Gresham — Philadelphia clergyman — “The first syllable is pronounced like May, the name of the month. In the second syllable the ch is as in chin, with e as in pen: may’chen. In Gresham, the h is silent: gres’am.”
Thus, we have a good idea how the father (Arthur W. Machen) and the son (J.G. Machen) (who was also known as “Das”) pronounced their names. One thing to know about Arthur’s wife, Mary Jones Gresham Machen, is that her nickname was “Minnie.”
Get to know more about and by the Machens here at Log College Press (several biographies of the son are available at our Secondary Sources page), and learn how one family had a profound impact on American Presbyterianism.
