Member-only story
An Ode to the Unnamed Women
A granddaughter remembers them.
If you follow me, you know that I’m into genealogy in a big way. My great-aunt hooked me in when I was a teenager and I’ve been obsessed ever since.
Some ancestors are easier to find than others. My father’s side of the family was been relatively easy to research, with many English ancestors, while my mother’s side has been more difficult with Sicily and Prussia. It’s always exciting to make a new connection, to solve a mystery, to learn a new fact.
The thing that really gets to me, though, are the unnamed women. It’s more common, the further I go back in history and the less well-to-do the family is.
I find names like:
Goodewyfe Wilshyre
Margaret
Catherine
Unknown
Mary
Tamsin
Lady H.
There are several more. These women aren’t missing names or parts of their names because they didn’t have them, it’s because they weren’t important enough to record at the time. I’ve seen many marriage records from churches listing just the woman’s first name. Granted, they’re not all like that, but it still irritates me that society saw fit to only partially record them. Sometimes they died very young…
