The COG's last name comes from 'stile' which is a structure allowing people to cross through or over a fence or boundary, while keeping the animals confined. My last name comes from the word 'bridge', a structure allowing people to cross over a river, ravine, road or other barrier. Presumably each of us had an ancestor who lived by one of these structures and who became known by the name of the structure. And here we both are, millennia later, still straddling two worlds.
It's sometimes difficult to feel as if I have two places where I belong. Two places where I want to be. I've always kind of envied people who live in the same place all their lives and run into people they've known as long as they can remember at the supermarket or the library. But then I think of what I would give up, if I only had one place, if I'd never left home. Then, feeling divided seems a small price to pay.
Every place you go, you miss something you left behind. But if you never go anywhere, you miss all the things you would have discovered in new places.
So, no complaints. In fact, I kind of like the sense that I am somehow fulfilling an imperative built into my DNA.
2 comments:
In the link you sent on the Briggs DNA site last week, they noted (and I didn't read further into the article) that while they had linked "Briggs" with those with the last name "Bridge" in early genetic study- they'd discontinued that as they'd found no genetic link between the two databases (So no genetic link between the Briggs' and the Bridges. Or did I misread this?)
No, you did not misread it. Or if you did, I did, too. The commonly accepted 'meaning' of the name Briggs is 'dweller by a bridge'. But apparently the Briggses and the Bridges are not related.
There are those who speculate that Briggs actually comes from the people who worshipped the Celtic goddess Briga. These people were called the Brigantes, among other things, and they lived in the north of England where the name Briggs is supposedly from.
The Brigantes were fierce warriors who just never did accept the Roman rule as the Romans would have liked. And the word 'brigand' comes from this root.
This explanation might account for the strong measure of oppositional personality disorder that exists in our family. And I quite like this explanation.
However, I also like the 'bridge' explanation.
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