Category: Memoir

My middle name is Loia, and for most of my life, it was a mystery.

It’s funny this WordPress prompt comes up today… because I’ve spent decades carrying that name without really knowing why.

I always knew it was rare. I knew it sounded different. But beyond that, it was just this odd, beautiful word that sat between my first and last name like a secret I didn’t yet understand.

What I did know was that it was also my step great-grandfather’s middle name.

He wasn’t related to me by blood at all. He was my great-grandmother’s second husband, and they never had any children together.

On paper, he and I weren’t really connected at all.
But life doesn’t always follow paper.

He was always around as I was growing up. He loved me and helped raise me like I was his own. He was an extraordinary man, steady and present, and he stayed in my life until he passed away in the mid-90s.

That middle name tied us together, even if I didn’t know where it came from. I just knew I shared something with him, and that felt important—even if I couldn’t put it into words.

When I started my blog back in November, I chose Loia as my pen name. I wasn’t even sure why I did it at the time.

It just felt right… like the name was waiting for that moment.

Maybe it reminded me of him.
Or maybe the name had just been sitting there all along.

Either way… I typed it into the author field.
And it just felt right.

Recently, I started digging into it…
really digging.

I wanted to know what I’d been carrying all these years.

I found out that Loia was my step great-grandfather’s mother’s maiden name.

She was an Italian immigrant, and she gave that name to her son as his middle name… so he would carry it with him—to keep her lineage from being forgotten.

That’s when it really hit me.

She didn’t want her name, her people, her story to disappear into the dust of time.

So she planted it in her child’s name like a seed.

And now, somehow, I carry it too.

I’m not Italian at all, at least not by blood. Yet here I am, bearing the same name she fought to preserve.

Somehow.. I became part of what she started… long before I was even born.

And somehow I’m the one who ended up running with it.

I traced Loia back to its Latin origin and into the early Roman Empire.

I followed it as far back as the 12th century, to the Loia family in the southern Italian peninsula, in places like Campania. There may even be some Sicilian roots branching off that same line.

I read stories about relatives from those eras, names.. dates.. fragments of lives, and it was fascinating.

It felt like finding my name written in a story that started centuries before me… even though none of them are my blood.

Apparently it’s a rare surname.

Old as dirt…

the kind of name that has seen things.

I could have kept tracing it back even further, but at some point.. I decided to stop.

I knew enough.

I had already learned more than I ever expected to… and the mystery started feeling like it belonged to me.

Growing up, I pronounced it “Loy” like “Joy,” because that’s how I was told by my mother to say it.

Only recently did I learn that the Italian way is more like “LOH-yah.”

It’s interesting hearing the same name two different ways—one from my childhood, the other from Italy.

And then there’s this other detail that feels too poetic to ignore…

My girlfriend is also an Italian/Sicilian immigrant and an American citizen.

The way we met, the timing, the circumstances around it—it all carries this almost storybook quality.

“Coincidence” doesn’t quite feel like the right word anymore.

I don’t know how to explain it fully.

It just feels like there’s a hand at work in my life right now…
quietly lining things up.

This old, rare name.
The man who loved me like his own.
The Italian mother who didn’t want her lineage forgotten.
My choice of pen name.
My girlfriend’s story.

All these crooked lines seem to be converging in ways I couldn’t have planned if I tried.

So what is my middle name, and what is its meaning or significance?

My middle name is Loia.

It’s the name of a man who helped raise me, the name of an Italian woman who refused to let her family disappear, a name that has survived centuries, continents, and bloodlines to land here, in my life, on my byline.

It reminds me that family isn’t always about blood… and that sometimes the things we carry our whole lives… finally make sense.

“It’s not what you got… it’s what you give.
It aint the life you choose… it’s the life you live.”

© 2026 Bryan Loia Hudson

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