--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:> > I live about 6 miles from the Kent border. Don't > know of any Actons but it's > a pretty big county. >
sure it is, and even though my grandmother came from a large family (as far as I'm aware), I think a lot of them left for Canada, the U.S., Australia - they're probably all over the world. I do know the place she came from was quite small, just a farming village, really (her parents were farmers) and that my Dad visited the last time he was in England, maybe about five years ago and that he told me the name of the place, but I can never remember it - it's not something you'd normally hear about since it's so tiny. I'm sure my Aunt Betty (my Dads's sister in Montreal) would know and I owe her a phone call anyway, so I'll check. Once my parents were travelling in Europe and a guy in the Italian Alps, finding out they were from Canada, wanted to know if they knew his brother - turns out the brother lived in Vancouver, kind of a stretch from Toronto! On a different note, when I was in Topsfield this year, I stopped Sunday morning in a small coffee shop where a number of people were coming and going. There was a woman who came in who looked *exactly* like one of my mother's sisters, except that her jaw was shaped a bit different. When she talked, she even talked like some of my mother's family - some of them (including my Aunt Monica, the one this woman looked like) and my mother had a bit of a slur in their speech - if you didn't know better, you might think they were a bit drunk. Anyway, this woman had that same kind of speech and her voice could have been one of my aunts'. The only thing different was, of course, the New England accent. I wanted to ask her if she knew where her ancestors were from, but I didn't do it and now i'm sorry. I did hear her talking with some other old fella about church and mass, so they'd be Catholic, probably Irish (the look of my mother's family was so Irish, it's almost a cliche). And the kinds of things they were talking about were so much like the way my mother and her sisters used to talk (which is one of the reasons I didn't want to talk to her - I can't explain, but they were often a bit petty about things, a bit prim, like anyone who didn't do things *their* way was just plain stupid). We're not sure where in Ireland they originated, going a long way back, because even my great grandparents were born in Canada and we're not sure when the family first came over from Ireland, but likely during the famine. On that side, there were McGuires, Merrimans (doesn't sound very Irish to me), Powers and a few others - my Dad had written out a bit of a family tree that my stepmother gave me a year or so ago (after Dad died) that I'm going to follow up on and share with my brother and sisters. Same thing on my Dad's side - his father was born in Newfoundland (which wasn't actually part of Canada back then) and the records were lost when the church in St. John's burned down. His side is most likely Scottish. So the only one I know for sure is my grandmother McKay (Acton). ______________________________________________________ Send your holiday cheer with http://greetings.yahoo.ca
