WELCOME to WALTON LODGE
A place for wandering Waltons to
keep in touch
In
2010 I was on a ten day walking tour of Yorkshire led by George Redmonds, “the
leading authority on the origins of English (especially Yorkshire’s) personal
names, place-names and language” (according to his Guardian obituary).[i] I asked him why I kept seeing signs
saying "Walton" with arrows pointing here and there. George explained
that there was a town called Walton, and that very early on "Walton"
became a word for travelers from Wales who worked from town to town. It pointed
to places where they would find lodging for themselves and their families. I
recently found a similar explanation on a deep diving historical website:
“In
the beginning. . .
. . . the name “Walton” is fairly common in England, there are several villages and districts with the same name. One of the origins of the name is as a reference to a “village of the Welsh” or serfs. The Welsh being the native Britons living in what we now know as England. When the Romans left and the Romano-Britons had to fend for themselves, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived from the area now known as Germany and the Netherlands to occupy large areas of the former Roman province. Some of these folk were already here, employed as mercenaries by the Romans. A settlement was already in existence when the Saxons arrived in the 7th century. The name has changed over the centuries from Weala-tun in Saxon days, through Waleton in the Domesday Book, Waton later in Norman times, settling on Walton in the Middles Ages. . ." https://overtown.org.uk/about-walton/history.html
Our
DNA places
us clearly in the Midlands, in area call “the Potteries.” When
you get to the DNA part of our blog, you’ll see that our early Waltons didn’t
move outside of Warwickshire. When they moved within, it was for
work.
Dedication: Niece Deb Gilbert
and I have chosen WALTON LODGE as our blog name, and dedicate
it to James Walton & Sarah Favel Atkin, and her sister Lydia Anne
Atkin & William Batchelor, their families and descendants. We are all
Waltons at Walton Lodge no matter what our names are now.
Lavinia (Gilbert) Schwarz - great
greatgrandaughter of James & Sarah Walton
[i] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/21/george-redmonds-obituary
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