Tag: families

Walking the family line

My niece Eleanor preserved the family name by a happy accident when she married Ben. Picture by Bella Bradford Photography

You might remember that a couple of weeks back I talked about family names, and reader Wendy Sissons mentioned that her father’s side of the family use ‘Leedham’ as a middle name for some of the men in the family. She wasn’t sure where it came from, but assumed it was the surname of a relative.

Since then, I‘ve been talking to my mum, and she remarked that her eldest brother, Henry (b.1932), had the middle name ‘Harland’, which was the surname of their father’s mother. Her second brother, John (b.1935), was given the middle name ‘Lacy’ which was their mum’s maiden name.

Was this a convention to preserve the surnames of the female lines due to the fact that women surrendered their own surnames upon marriage? By including it as a given name in the male line of descendants it would not only ensure the ancestors were memorialised, but there would be less chance that the family names would vanish altogether, should there be no other males to carry it forward as a surname.

Do you know the middle names of your aunts, uncles and cousins? I certainly didn’t, and that’s where our family tree came in handy. Using that, I discovered that, interestingly, my Uncle Henry’s son, my cousin Richard (b.1964), was given the middle name ‘Lacy’, and he also passed it on to his own son Charles (b.1997). As far as I am aware, that’s where the references to the family name ‘Lacy’ end. I do wonder why Henry chose ‘Lacy’ for his son, rather than the ‘Harland’ of his own name, and I can’t see any others on the tree with that as a middle name either. My mum had five siblings in total, but the rest were all girls (my mum being the eldest, born in 1937).

I wonder if there exists a field of expertise that focuses on the history of surname usage, and how practices have changed down the centuries? A family name was, and still is, a source of great pride for lots of us, but with many women now opting to keep their own surname on marriage, there is perhaps less likelihood of them disappearing from the family line. It is also a fact that in 2025 there are more couples who choose not to get married at all and therefore the choice as to whether to keep your own or take on your spouse’s name is irrelevant.

When I was young, we associated double-barrelled surnames with ‘posh’ people, but today they are much more common among we plebs. Unmarried parents will often link their surnames together when children are born. There are also more divorces and more second marriages, and children born through a second marriage are sometimes given the surname of both parents combined which will also mean they have a name in common with their older step siblings.

I have mentioned before that I was married to a Dutch man, and in the more enlightened Netherlands, the convention is for women to keep their own surname which they add to that of their husband when they marry so that it becomes double-barrelled (with the woman’s surname last). However, it only applies to the wife, so any children born of that marriage will still have just the husband’s last name.

I divorced ten years ago, and kept my married name for a long time afterwards, simply because it was the same as my children who were still in their teens when we split up. I wanted to keep some kind of normalcy for them as we navigated a very difficult period. However, as they grew into adulthood, having the same name as them grew less important, while wanting to go back to my own became more so, particularly after I lost my dad and sister Tricia, who was still a Walker. With them gone, and my eldest sister Janet married and my Buddhist monk brother switching to a chosen Buddhist name, there was just my mum who still had the surname ‘Walker’. Therefore, once I took over these columns, I decided to reclaim my family name.

My little story doesn’t quite end there. My eldest niece, Eleanor Bradshaw – daughter of Janet – got married in 2023 and took her husband’s name.

And that name? Of course, it is Walker.

Do you have opinions, memories or ideas to share with me? Get in touch with me using the ‘Contact’ button on the top right.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 24th and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 22nd Oct 2025

Out of the fire

Betty McDonald on holiday in Southern Spain last year. She has kept diaries since she was young

I’ve had some more feedback from readers on the subject of photographs. Betty MacDonald, who will turn 90 this year (I hope you don’t mind me mentioning that, Betty!) writes: “I have many photographs from years gone by, and memories of sending them off to be developed and printed, and especially onto slides…we used to have many an evening watching a slide show.”

She adds: “I’ve kept diaries for decades, which I enjoy writing, and call my ‘reference library’. I can look up what I did 50 years ago on any given date. These are for me only. I have mentioned to my daughter when the time comes to find a spot in the garden and burn them all, although this might not be possible as I fear the fire brigade might have to be in attendance!

“Queen Elizabeth kept a diary and at 6 o’clock every day she sat down to write in it. So I feel as though I have been in good company…I’ve enjoyed my time with all of my collections of stuff over the years, but nothing is forever.”

Betty’s daughter send me a sweet note about her mother too: “She’s a fantastic mam and nana, always has an interesting story to tell and has such a happy outlook on life.” And at the end she added: “P.S. I won’t burn the diaries!”

Do many people still keep daily diaries? My gut tells me not, because everything is so ‘visual’ today that it is rare to find someone who takes the time to sit down and write about their day. I did it when I was a teenager, and when I was away on a gap year in the mid-1980s. I also wrote diaries when I went travelling in South-East Asia because my dad said I would regret it if I didn’t. They came in useful on my return when the newspaper I worked for asked me to do a series of travelogues about each country I visited. It would have been impossible without the diaries, and so I was very grateful for my dad’s advice.

I occasionally look back upon them now with an understanding of why it was so important to keep a contemporaneous record. There is so much detail that I would never have remembered, and they take me back to a time when I was young and carefree. The 1980s don’t seem that long ago, and yet so much has changed since then that they make a fascinating read. They may not mean much to anyone else, but perhaps my children will one day find them interesting.

Alan Graham also got in touch to say: “I always read your piece and was interested in the recent topic of printing photos. Like others I rarely if ever print photos nowadays but I do print and enlarge those that are good, clear and of lasting interest…and mount them in a traditional photo album, the sort with blank pages and a sheet of tracing paper between…Double-sided sellotape is all that’s needed on the back and they never come adrift, even decades later. A short typed label under each photo (who, where, when) adds a permanent memory.

“I’ve got precious pictures of my daughter growing up, my wife, even my cars and motorbikes going back 40 years and these albums are the things I’d save – as they say – in a fire.”

And that prompts me to ask, what would you save from a fire? Would it be something practical like your passport, or something valuable, like your jewellery? Or like Alan, would it be pictures of your loved ones?

For me, the material stuff means nothing, but there are certain things that cannot ever be replaced, such as signed copies of my dad’s books, handwritten letters from loved ones from years ago. I also have a large collection of birthday and Mother’s Day cards that my children have sent me every year since they were able to write and in which they have written very special messages that I never want to lose.

But, as Betty says, we cannot take everything with us, can we. So if you had to choose just one item to save, what would it be and why? Do get in touch via my contact page to let me know.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 14th March and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 5th March 2025