My name is Martyn Cole Bigelow Gardiner Mulford, but like most folks I use just two or three names ordinarily. Erma Louise Stephenson Courtenay, my mother, named me after a friend, Marty Robbins, as she promised him she would, and after her other favorite musical artist, Nat King Cole. Harold Edward Gardiner Mulford, my father, named me Bigelow after his father, Henry Bigelow Mulford, and after Henry's grandfather Russell Bigelow Mulford, our hero of the Civil War, named after the famed Methodist Episcopal missionary Rev. Russell Bigelow who served his parents' Ohio congregation. My mother didn't like the name Bigelow, so I wasn't allowed to use it publicly, but I'm a grown man now and like it just fine. Gardiner with Mulford is our compound surname, traditional in my father's paternal line, descendants of Lt. Lion Gardiner of Gardiners Island, East Hampton, the Hamptons, Long Island. Great-Great-Grandfather Russell Bigelow Mulford was the great-great-great-great-grandson of William Mulford (Molford) of Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey, brother of Thomas Mulford of Massachusetts and Virginia and brother of Judge John Mulford of Massachusetts and of East Hampton, the Hamptons, New York, sons of Sarah of Maidstone and Thomas Southcott Mulford of Boston, Massachusetts, a disinherited son of Susanna Southcott and Thomas Molford of Cadbury, Devonshire, England. Great-Great-Grandfather Russell's wife, Melissa Valentine, was Russell's cousin and a descendant of all three Mulford brothers, twice from Judge John, once from William, and once from Thomas, so I'm a Mulford many times over. In fact my mother, descending from the Courtenays of England, is a Mulford descendant as well, descended from Guido (Guy), brother of Richard the very first Mulford. Various, confirmed details of our Mulford origins have been carefully passed down father-to-son in my father's line, for centuries. Originally our name was spelled "with an O" instead of U, and in the beginning there was "no L" in it. Historically the name has been pronounced as "Mo'ford" with a bit of nasalized "n" sound, leaving the L silent as my father does to this day, like his fathers before him as noted in various public records. The earliest Mulfords (Molfords), before they were even called Mulfords, came, we are told, from a place somewhere between France, Holland, and Germany, eventually settling in England and later New England.