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I had an interesting conversation with a coroner once who had just returned from a trip where had had to officially declare someone as being actually dead. The interesting bit was that the person in question was just a pile of bones that had been found during some construction work and they had evidently been there a very long time. He still had to make it official though by taking a look and saying, "yep... They're dead"!

The origin of my surname, Ebrey, was always a bit of a puzzle to me until one day I was scrutinizing a large scale map of Shropshire (where the vas majority of Ebreys seem to have come from) and I noticed a tiny place called Ebreywood. Now I like to think that my name originated with a scruffy old hermit who lived in the wood!

Unless, of course, the scruffy hermit came first and the woods were named after him...

Recently I attended a genealogy presentation on how to do English research from not-England, which comes in handy for someone like me who lives in Alabama but was born in England and has ALL her ancestors over there.

The speaker started out by telling us all how he had been doing English genealogy for over 40 years, etc., then the meat of the program was an overview of a lot of different websites. Okay, so I knew about most of them but I did learn a few things so that was cool.

Then he walked us through a real live example of how he had tracked someone through all the ages and places using just online resources. He started in London so I sort of stopped paying attention until I saw he had moved up to Shrewsbury, where I have a lot of ancestors. Got bored again after a minute and was thinking about my next meal (something I can always think about!) when I suddenly heard him say something that sounded exactly like "And then they moved to Ann Boleyn."

Ann Boleyn?? Looking at the slide on display, I saw that he had crossed the Welsh border and was focused on a town with a name too small to read from my seat. Then he said it again, but now it sounded like Lan-goal-in.

The light bulb came on....he was aiming for Llangollen!

Seeing as the migratory trail looked like it was heading further into Wales, with even more pronounciatory pitfalls ahead, I stopped thinking about dinner.

Sure enough, the next stop was Llanymynech. Only it came out as Lane-ee-MY-netch. I might have snorted a bit too loudly at that point because the speaker glared at me and said, "Or however you say it."

Now, I'm not Welsh, but when I was growing up my mother's parents ran a hatchery just outside of Welshpool and we used to visit a lot. I remember struggling with a Welsh place name when I was about 8 years old and my grandmother firmly told me that "you must learn to say it properly or it's disrespectful."

You would think a genealogy presenter would have though to at least check the pronunciation beforehand.

And I did get something out of the class... a couple of new websites and the firm association of Ann Boleyn with a small Welsh town. 

But, oh how I wish his example family had made it as far as Llanfair PG!

Pamela

Hi William,
No, Annie was firmly from Cheshire, b 1856. Her father was Samuel Manley and her mother was Catharine Evans.
I have a copy of a portrait of Annie. She looks like the quintessential grandmother!
Pamela