[lit-ideas] Re: SUNDAY POEM/Macgillonies of Strone
- From: "Steven G. Cameron" <stevecam@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 14:55:03 -0400
David Ritchie wrote:
> on 10/20/04 5:37 AM, Steven G. Cameron at stevecam@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> How he came to choose Cameron is
>
>>interesting. "Cohanim," of course, has a better known, historical
>>derivation.
>>
>>TC,
>
>
> And how *did* he come to choose Cameron?
**As you may have guessed, when sufficiently old enough to understand,
we three children asked my father, both how and why. He explained:
**His great, great grandfather, while escaping from the Pale and the
latest spate of pogroms, had only enough funds to travel (west) as far
as GB, settling for a time in Wales -- taking on menial labor to afford
the final leg of his intended journey to NYC. It seems to have taken him
about 13 months to save up enough. My father wanted to commemorate this
stay (we also learned that he was treated well there, enjoyed Wales
despite language difficulties, and continued on his journey somewhat
reluctantly) -- fear of the unknown -- unwilling to leave a place so
unlike his land of birth, where now he wasn't constantly afraid -- who
knows?? Only 22-years-old, having spent the past four or so years in
the navy, identifying/marking everything with his initials, my father
said he didn't want to relabel all of his possessions. Too
young/uneducated to understand that a Scots name wasn't the same as a
Welsh one, he selected Cameron to solve his two objectives.
**We (my siblings) have discussed changing our name back a number of
times. My older brother gave his daughter, Evyn, a middle name of Cohen.
TC,
/Steve Cameron, NJ
> One of our Jewish friends, of
> Russian descent, spent a year at St. Andrews' University, where people
> welcomed her "back" to her "ain" country, taking her name as a sign that she
> was a Scot. She, alas, doesn't know how or why her father's side changed
> their name to Ross--her father died when she was a child and her mother
> didn't know--but I was able to tell her that the first Ross on record was a
> Yorkshire Norman, Godfrey de Ros. His lot moved to Scotland when someone or
> other's lands were forfeit and he found himself next in line for a favor.
> Ross, of course, refers to red hair, the characteristic that led Viking
> invaders who went east to be called "Russians."
>
> David Ritchie
> Portland, Oregon
>
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