Jun 16th, 2009
Is in-law the best we can do?
While writing a blog post recently, I came to somebody whose relationship to me I couldn’t describe. My genealogy software thankfully does this for me, so I looked her up. Wife of great-uncle. Isn’t that clumsy? And it also feels pretty impersonal: ‘after all, she was only the wife of my great-uncle‘. It set me thinking. Why don’t we have a word for relatives who come into our families by marriage?
We call them in-laws which is a practical enough legal term but there’s little affection in it. I mean, how many mother-in-law jokes d’you know? The French, unusually for such a pragmatic people, call the mother of your partner belle mere – hard to make jokes about her if she’s your ‘lovely mother’. The term in-law doesn’t even extend that far. Brother, sister, mother, father. We don’t say grandfather-in-law or niece-in-law.
It’s when we come to aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, that things really start to come unstuck. (more…)
May 17th, 2009
Wartime weddings
It was 1942, bang in the middle of World War II. Two Cowan family weddings were planned – one for March and the other for June. The first was the wedding of Daisy Cowan, my Dad’s only surviving sister.
Her name wasn’t really Daisy – it was Anne Brown Cowan (on her marriage certificate, she’s known as Annie). The name’s important – she was named directly for her paternal grandmother Anne, who was born in India and married a Scottish solider. Family legend says that Daisy came about because somebody gazing into her pram, cooed ‘awww she looks like a wee daisy’. It’s a nice story but of course it isn’t true – I’ve found a reference to the original Annie Brown being called Daisy. For all I know, there are more – enough for a daisy chain perhaps?
At the age of 25, she was marrying Ian MacEwan, also 25 – whose real name was John. This happens a lot in Scottish families – Ian is an equivalent of John. And then there’s Johns who become (more…)
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