Ancestral Ties

A Memory of Berkhamsted.

My story is similar to that of Yvonne Parker. When I got married in 1974 we bought our first house in Victoria Road and raised our three children there. They all attended a playgroup in the Baptist Church on the other side of the High Street and moved on to Victoria School, one of them eventually moving up to Bridgewater Middle School. By this time we had moved to the other end of the town before leaving to make our home in Norfolk in 1986.
I had been brought up in Edgware in the former county of Middlesex, and my parents had both come from Fulham, so it was a total shock to me when I recently started researching my family history to find a strong connection with Berkhamsted on my mother's side. Her grandfather, John Seabrook Putnam was born in Great Gaddesden in 1862, where his father, William was landlord of The Cock and Bottle. William had been born in Berkhamsted and moved to Great Gaddesden to marry my great grandmother, Elizabeth Axtel. It seems that Putnam is a local name, originating from the nearby hamlet of Puttenham, and I have several ancestors who all lived around Berkhamsted, or nearby in Northchurch. As Yvonne says, it's a small world!