The Pickles Family

If your name is Pickles, why not drop me an email to tell me about yourself?

Granddaughter Sons Father Grandfather Great-Grandfather

Samantha Joe, Daniel & Matthew Chris Frank Stanley

The Family

The "Oxford Dictionary of Surnames" says that the surname "Pickles" (and its various different spellings) is a Middle English (medieval) word meaning a smallholder - a farmer with a small farm. The examples that it gives of place-names including the word "Pickles" all come from Yorkshire - from the West Riding of Yorkshire, England..

The Pickles family seems to have started somewhere in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and then to have spread outwards. In the days before the Industrial Revolution you could imagine farmers squeezing a meagre living out of the hills and valleys on the eastern side of the Pennine hills. Sheep farming, wool and weaving went together. Weaving started as a cottage industry, with handlooms. As the Industrial Revolution moved ahead, people gave up farming and moved down into the valleys to work in the towns, still as weavers. They still operated looms in their houses in the towns. New mills were built, and the people went to work in the mills. Around the mills grew towns, and the towns grew and offered more services and job opportunities, and the railways linked them together.

In my branch of the Pickles family, I can follow this trend from the early 1800s to the early 1900s as the employment of the head of the family changed from handloom weaver to machine weaver to draper to railway clerk. Many of the children's birth certificates are signed with a simple cross - the "mark" of the mother or father registering the birth, because they were unable to write.

The Pickles family expanded - across England, and across the seas. You can find members of the Pickles family all over the world today - they are much more widespread than I had thought. Look on the Internet - or in a telephone directory when you are visiting a different country - and you may be surprised how many of us are out there! Some have been famous, most of us have not, but we all know where our family came from originally - a little corner of Yorkshire hundreds of years ago.