Dynasty

My mother’s mother was born a Peircy and a distant relative, Brian Piercy, told me that anyone with either of these spellings is a Percy. He has done 40 years of research into the Percys.

My great grandfather was cut off without a penny, as they say, for marrying beneath him. Though my mother always said he had been `cut off with a penny` so perhaps he did get something. The Peircy girls were not impoverished. My grandmother and one of her sisters bought shops. They were amongst the older children, so presumably helped their mother and younger siblings that way.

My mother was always poor, though that was to do more with her own choice of marriage than her origins. She was aggrieved because she claimed she was really from the aristocracy and the Duke of Northumberland. Brian Piercy, however, said he had not researched every strand and we only have a few generations that are traceable. He did not know about any side links into the greater ‘tree’ for me or whether we were from the Duke. But the constant refrain, in my childhood, was my mother`s, `We may be poor, but we are not common.`

My great grandfather was George Borland Peircy, and family tales say he was an artist. He performed at theatres, where he drew lightening cartoons and told jokes. He designed a statue in London. He went to Westminster school and was a Freeman of the City of London. And he knew Charles Dickens.  He died young and left a wife and many children, mostly daughters, including my grandmother. Way back the Percys were not good at producing male heirs, and husbands of the girls had to take the Percy name. He is said to have been very clever at maths as well as artistic subjects. He did things like hold poetry readings in his home, which is the sort of thing I have since done, though on a more modest scale.

I would love to know what sections of these stories are true, a little more about him, and where we link in to the Percy story. I have long family tree diagrams of the Percys, though, as I say, not much of my own side. I am not a researcher. I have lost touch with Brian now. I only found him as someone drew my attention to family research society which named him. He is a very distant relative much older than me, and therefore may well no longer be with us.

I have names and dates of George Borland and his father.

I wonder if any readers believe they are Percys and have a fuller tree than the one given to me?

My mother did not look after things well and, after her death, I could not find the old family photographs I grew up with. There was one of my grandmother Mildred (who for some reason was always referred to as Jack) and her sisters. I had known Amy and Nellie and know of Charlotte, but there are photographs of the other sisters whom I never met. Maybe they died young or lived a long way away from London. These were Eva, Lena and Annie.

The ones I would love to meet, or their descendants, are Eva or Lena, because one of those had exactly the same face as me. How often do you see that?

Pamela Pickton
pamela.pickton@zitebooks.com
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Pamela Pickton‘s novel Neverland is on sale on amazon now, and on all good ebook websites, and read about her travails and worldly challenges in her Zitebooks collection of short stories, Reasons, which is also available to download from Amazon.