Jun 30th, 2009
Tell me it’s not true
Today I’m in that least enviable of positions for a family historian – I suspect that I’ve been following the wrong family and that great-great-great-grandfather Cowan was somebody else. [Silent Scream]
His parents lost several of their children and later children were given the same name. So there’s two Marys, two Thomases and, crucially for me, two Williams. The second William only came to light yesterday (born in 1778) and wouldn’t have been a problem except he was born two years after my William. That would indicate that the first child called William died in infancy and the next boy child took the name. Unfortunately, my William is the first child and I have records of him living until 1852. [Sigh]
These Cowans lived in a Stirlingshire village called Airth from the 18th (more…)
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…)
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