Journeys

Journey No 1.  I have been keeping a document in which I keep the daily writing prompts from Natalie Pithers of Genealogy Stories fame and she can be found on social media site Bluesky.  I have decided to write on this blog weekly using one of her prompts.  This in itself is a new journey for me.  I have tried the #52 ancestors way and fail dismally in keeping up so am now determined that no matter what I will try to keep up with this one...watch this space.

Journey No 2.  Strangely I was only talking about this journey the other evening and this is that golden opportunity to get it down on paper.

We were talking about the Great London smog of 1952 and I remembered a family journey in the late 50's when Dad drove us from Hertfordshire to East Sussex to visit grandparents; least that was the intention.  We had travelled as far as South London but the smog got thicker and thicker until Mum was leaning out of one car window to keep an eye on the kerb and Dad was leaning out of the other window to keep an eye on the white line in the middle of the road.  The car lights faintly glowed in the yellow thick swirling fog and couldn't penetrate enough to see clearly.  It finally reached a point where the strain was too much and Dad decided the best thing to do was to turn round and go home.  I wonder whether my sister and I, as young children,  sensed the tension and kept quiet or whether we weren't helping matters by squbbling or aaking a child's favourite question of "Are we there yet" or "When are we going to be there?"

P is for .......

 A U3A family history group I go to is currently progressing through letters of the alphabet as a topic for their monthly meetings.  We can either talk about some sort of genealogical resource/record/event/location etc or find something from our personal family history to talk about.  

Last month we reached the letter P.  Some very obvious topics sprung to mind but to avoid duplicating what someone else might talk about we often try to find an obscure reference to the letter.  I deliberately ignored the obvious ones of Parish Registers, Poor Houses, Poor Law, Paternity, Proof standards, Probate and Petty sessions, to name but a few and chose a name.  So, what did I choose?

I chose the name Peggy and where it came from.  I found it was a mediaeval variation of Margaret.... Margaret, Meggy/Peggy Maggie/Peggie and Meg/Peg.  It has been used in may cultures and races around the world and has a name day on December 12th in Norway.  With the formal information quickly out the way I moved on to my ancestor called Peggy or Peg.

Peggy or Peg as she was often called, wasn't in fact a Peggy but a Margaret and even then it wasn't her first name of Edith but her second name.  She didn't know who she was named after but her mother didn't like the name and she was given a second name of Margaret her mother insisted she was called Peggy and not Edith or Edie.  I looked a little bit further in her ancestors and found Peggy had an Auntie Edie, her father's sister in law.  Was that the link?  Looking further I found she had a great aunt Edith as well, also on her father's side of the family; was that the link?  The name Peggy was beginning to grow in popularity when she was born in the mid 1920s but it didn't peak until the middle of the next decade whereas the name Edith hd peaked a decade or so earlier and was quickly falling even further.

Margaret?  Did the name have a particular significance to Peggy's mother?  Unfortunately I will never know.  There are several Margaret's amongst Peggy's ancestors, the most likely being her mothers great grandmother, Margaret Ann Hoad who had married Dick Douch Clark who I have blogged about before.  Much more unlikely is her mothers great x5  great aunt, Margaret Christmas back in the 1600's, her great x 6 great grandmother or her great x 6 great uncle's wife.

It made me wonder who I was named after, I will never know!