Long ago, when I first met my sister-in-law to-be, a student in her early 20s, she asked me where I’d grown up. I told her that I’d spent my elementary school years in Boonville, North Carolina, and that we’d moved to Winston-Salem when I was in high school. She pondered my remarks for a moment, then said, “Those are strange names.” Her comment nearly made me burst out laughing. We were speaking in the den of her family’s home in Milwaukee, near a community called Wauwatosa and a short distance from the Menomonee and the Kinnikinic Rivers. Talk about strange names! Like her, most of us are accustomed to the place-names surrounding us, so familiar in our ears that we rarely pause to reflect on their origins or meaning. In my case, I knew that Boonville was so named because Daniel Boone once spent a couple of nights there while …