Oh Those Confusing Victorians!
Jan. 27th, 2024 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo My great-great-great grandparents John Larkin and his wife Ann gave their oldest children conventional English names- Eliza, Charlotte, James- but then went wild and gave their two youngest daughters the names of Hebrew prophetesses- Abigail and Nodiah- and their youngest son the Hindu name Libish. Were they now reading comparative religion and/or attending lectures by advanced thinkers? Certainly, the books and the lectures were there for them to access if they'd wanted- and this was the age of the working-class auto-didact. Their great grandson Cyril (my grandfather (oh but it gets confusing) grew up in the same mileu- sixty years down the line- and was deeply interested in history, philosophy and comparative religion. Perhaps it was a family tradition.
On my mother's side of the family, my great-greats Richard and Sarah Colenutt, provision merchants of Ryde on the Isle of Wight, were lifelong friends of the writer Mark Rutherford- who wrote semi-autobiographical novels questioning and eventually rejecting the evangelical faith in which he was raised. Rutherford was a pal of George Eliot's and admired in the 20th century by Arnold Bennett, D.H. Lawrence and George Orwell. Do I need to read him? Probably.
Back to the paternal line and I find my great-grandmother Annie Grist (nee Larkin) was given the unusual middle name Amby in tribute to her maternal grandmother Amby Whiting (nee Lee.) Amby Lee: could that be a Romany name?
What interesting chaps these ancestors are turning out to be!
On my mother's side of the family, my great-greats Richard and Sarah Colenutt, provision merchants of Ryde on the Isle of Wight, were lifelong friends of the writer Mark Rutherford- who wrote semi-autobiographical novels questioning and eventually rejecting the evangelical faith in which he was raised. Rutherford was a pal of George Eliot's and admired in the 20th century by Arnold Bennett, D.H. Lawrence and George Orwell. Do I need to read him? Probably.
Back to the paternal line and I find my great-grandmother Annie Grist (nee Larkin) was given the unusual middle name Amby in tribute to her maternal grandmother Amby Whiting (nee Lee.) Amby Lee: could that be a Romany name?
What interesting chaps these ancestors are turning out to be!
