Family history across the seas

The topic for Week 33 in Amy Coffin’s and Geneablogger’s 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy and History series is: Nicknames. What was your childhood nickname, and what was the meaning behind it? You can also discuss the nicknames of other family members, both past and present.

Well this has to be the easiest topic in the 52 weeks series for me. Our family didn’t really “do” nicknames so there’s not much to say about this.  Even in the extended family nicknames just weren’t used. At school I had a nickname based on my initials but as I really didn’t like it, don’t think I plan on putting it out there again all these years later 😉

As a teenager one friend used to call me Tooheys (a New South Wales beer) due to the unusual spelling of my name with an “een” ending not the usual “ine” ending (I like to say it’s the Irish spelling but of course it’s not). As a fair dinkum Queenslander this nickname could have been offensive but as it was meant in jest and affection it had no sting in the tail.

My husband had a distant cousin who discovered when they called the roll in school that his real name was Peter, not Tim, as he’d been called all his life. Or the school mate called “Purple”, because they already had a “Blue” and a “Red”: Australian vernacular for a red-head. Apparently boys’ boarding schools are a source of rampant nicknames. Plainly I lived a boring childhood.