BY ANY OTHER NAME

I have  three personal days I have to use up at work by the end of
this month so I took for a mini-vacation. I intend to catch up on
some reading, writing and research, but the first thing on my agenda
today was to get a haircut. Unfortunately, I forgot my barber is closed
on Mondays.  

It's become a habit of mine lately on my days off to take my camera
with me when I leave the apartment, so since it was a sunny(but cold)
day and I was already out of the house I took a little ride around the
area to take some pictures. Mt. Vernon Cemetery is not far from the
barbershop so I decided to drive through it again but this time from
the back entrance to the front so that the gravestones that had been on
the passenger side on my last drive through were now on the driver
side and easier to shoot. And as luck would have it, one of the
headstones close to the road was this one:

The plot is for the Sprague-Denham family and the first name on the right
hand side of the stone was Henry Denham 1822-1903. I knew right
away who he was because I'd run across the name Denham while
researching the post for the Susan and Edward Dunham gravestone.
One of their uncles had been born George Dunham but changed his
name to Denham and went on to become a prominent businessman
in Boston and New York City. Another brother was Henry, and his
date of birth is given in The Dunham Genealogy as 13Feb 1822
and his wife as Hannah M. Sprague (p183) which matches up with
everything on the stone, except that it lists him as Henry Dunham.

I checked the records on Ancestry.com and found Henry listed as
Denham on the Federal Census as well as on the State Census at
FamilySearch Record Search.

So we have two brothers born under the name Dunham who had
changed their name to Denham while their siblings retained the
Dunham name. Considering that the name was originally Donham
I'm not too surprised it was changed again.

But I sure wish I knew the reason why they did it!