Great Aunt or Grand Aunt?

[peter]

We never called our grandmother anything other than 'Nanny'.

 

[Bob Spiers]

And what about the Duke of York and his 10,000 men - can't get more British than that and Great would not have the same resonance

 

[Bob Spiers]

Bob was one cuppa not enough for Granddad ?

Took me a while Heather but I got there in the end, well done

 

[emjay]

We never called our grandmother anything other than 'Nanny'.

My maternal grandmother was 'Nanny' to us.

Could be derived from the Welsh - 'nain' ? But there are variations here also : 'nain and taid'(nine and tad) or 'mam-gu and tad-cu' (mam-gi and tad-ci)
G Grandfather - 'hen daid' or 'hen-dad-cu' ('hen' being 'old')

Makes the 'English' debate of grand/great seem quite straight forward.

 

[emjay]

Took me a while Heather but I got there in the end, well done

Have a cuppa and a lie-down now Bob

 

[Gillian]

Nanny, of course, also means something else, ie a person who looks after someone else's children. There's an interesting explanation of the meaning of the word at nanny

 

[Alexander Bisset]

Nanny, of course, also means something else, ie a person who looks after someone else's children.

Isn't that what parents use grandparents for?

 

[Gillian]

Ha ha, Alexander!

 

[emjay]

Isn't that what parents use grandparents for?

We seem to be doing a lot of that recently, the (now 22 months old) twin boys are a challenge for us.

 

[Susan48]

We never called our grandmother anything other than 'Nanny'.

My mother, who worked as a nanny before she married my father, would never let us call our grandmother 'Nanny', and she herself was always 'Granny' to her grandchildren.

 

[Margery]

(now 22 months old) twin boys are a challenge for us.

Emjay, you have my sympathy!

 

[Katie Bee]

We always called our grandparents Grandma and Grandpa Surname.
I am a great aunt and am usually just called by my first name, but some try to call me aunt.
Bob's dad certainly would not have approved!

 

[AdrienneQ]

I'm a Great Aunt and the emphasis is always put on the Great, which is very nice

 

[AnneC]

My grandparents, and then my children's grandparents were all called Nanny & Granddad, but with the addition of a surname (Granddad Smith), a place (Nanny Turner Road) or in one case a cat's name (Nanny Tiny!) in order to distinguish them. When my daughter-in-law was pregnant with our first grandchild she asked us and her parents what we would like to be called - we chose Nanny & Granddad (following on from our family traditions) and the other grandparents chose Granny & Gramps. This works really well, especially as young Alex (and now his baby brother Ben) only has to remember one name per person! Our parents are Great Granddad and Great Nanny - both of whom are the proudest great grandparents ever, at 85 and 93 neither expected to live to see great grandchildren as both generations didn't have children until in their thirties. Picture shows 4 generations, youngest member meeting Great Nanny for the first time.

 

[jorghes]

I was lucky in that sense - my grandparents were Grandma & Pa and Granddad and Nanna, so there was never any double up!
My paternal first cousins have started having children and the protocol seems to be in our family that you ask your parents what they want to be called when it comes to the grandparent name - Granny/Grandma/Nanna/Nanny etc.

My mother who is yet to have any grandchildren, has firmly decided that she wants to be "Grandma" (She does NOT want to be Nanna) - and she was asking my father which he wanted to be known as, since they have a "grand-fur-baby", they have started practising. My father has yet to decide between Pa (what his father was known as) and Granddad, or anything else for that matter.

 

[Gillian]

I've written elsewhere about my grandmother's letters that I'm currently transcribing and now I see that her grandmother signs herself as both Granny and Grandmama. That would have been in about 1867. Unfortunately none of the letters of my grandmother to her grandmother have survived, so I don't know whether she wrote to Granny or Grandmama.

 

[Alexander Bisset]

When having grandparents decide has anyone encountered a conflict. Given that every couple having children is by definition one from your family and one from a different family. I could easily imagine occurrences where a grandparent is known by different names to different grandchildren because they were already X to the other grandparents.

Eg: known as granny to sons children but grandma to daughters children because son in law's mother had already bagged title of granny.

 

[Bob Spiers]

Interesting point Alexander. In my own upbringing in Birmingham as far as I ever knew grandmothers were grandma and grandfathers were granddad -and 'never the twain shall meet' sort of thing. We and our cousins used the same form of address and the only variations were to add surnames (by far the majority) or first names (frowned upon) about which I have already commented.

But on becoming a father myself and marrying a girl from far flung Northamptonshire (or so it seemed at the time), things were different and equally strongly upheld. Granddad was not used or even Grandpa, but just Pap and my two grew quite accustomed to referring to their maternal grandfather as Pap, and with some affectation I might add. Their Grandmother was always -wait for it - 'Tess' (short for Esther); yes a first name by which she was known to young and old alike. I tried to get them to say Granny Tess but it was short lived and Tess she became.

Of course on the 'Spiers' front when we visited them or they came to us my Dad & Mom were known once again as Granddad and Grandma Spiers maintaining the family convention.

It is only fair to continue this narrative to my own grandchildren where both son and daughter brought their children up to refer to us as Granddad Bob and Nan (first name for both their birth mother and now their step grandmother). It seems the most natural thing in the world now to have Granddad or Nan in front of our names. Of course there is another set of grandparents and although only a grandmother remained, she was known by all her grandchildren (from each offspring) as Granny (surname). So a bit of a mixed bag all round.

 

[emjay]

Has 'grand aunt/uncle' become the accepted term for our grandparents siblings? ( I do prefer it to great aunt/uncle)

I really meant that it makes sense when recorded, but I doubt I would use the term,in conversation it would be 'great'.