Some accounts have suggested that the name was chosen as a tribute to Amasa Mason Lyman, an LDS leader who may have been involved in some way with her during the Mormon years. This attribution appears in some secondary sources but is treated as uncertain by others. The NPS account does not affirm this connection, and the prompt for this article appropriately flags the Georgia family name as the more likely source.
The question of how enslaved people named themselves or retained names is itself significant. Names were one of the few forms of identity that enslaved people could maintain, and the specific history of a name was often a form of connection to family history that might otherwise be severed by sale and migration. That Biddy Mason kept a name through her decades of enslavement and carried it into freedom suggests something about its significance to her, even if that significance is not documented in the surviving record.
She went by “Biddy” throughout her life — a diminutive of Bridget that was common in the period. The name “Bridget” appears in formal legal documents; “Biddy” is how her community knew her. This distinction between legal name and community name is a small detail but a humanizing one: it places her in the social world of people who called her by the name she had always used, not by the formal designation of legal documents.
## Real Estate in a Growing City
The economic history of Biddy Mason’s real estate holdings is not documented with the precision that would allow for specific dollar figures, but the pattern is documented clearly enough to understand what happened. She bought property in what became the commercial center of Los Angeles when it was still a small and relatively poor city. She held that property as the city grew, as the railroad arrived, as the population boomed. By the time of her death in 1891, she had accumulated substantial wealth.