Holidays, Places and Names

Well, my holiday has come and gone, so now I am getting back into the study. Fortunately not too much happened while I was away – only seven new contacts to reply to (okay, two of them are people I have been in touch with before, but it was some years ago and they either don’t remember or didn’t recognise my contact details). Also received some information and useful links from a couple of my other contacts.

Some time ago, one of my family was looking for accommodation and found the chosen place was situated on “Parry’s Lane”. That set me thinking about places being named after Parrys, so I did a quick search on the Streetmap site and found that they list 51 assorted Avenues, Closes, Drives, Roads and Streets, involving the Parry name, as well as two actual places (a Castle and a Barn). For some reason, the Multimap site only finds fifteen results and some of those are duplications, where they have two versions of what appears to be the same address. Further investigation and comparisons obviously required!

But where else do Parry places occur?

One of the links sent to me was for the Geoscience Australia site, which indicates there are 36 places in Australia referring to Parry (although four of them are actually for Parryvale/Parryville so perhaps don’t count!). The site lists different types of features so again, further investigation is necessary to check on entries which may turn out to relate to the same place.

Another Australian site I’ve found is the Street Directory. You have to search by State but I found 82 street references, with some in every state except the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory.

So now I am on the hunt – looking for places to do with the Parry surname.

Another question soon follows though - who are they all named after?

I know from one of my Australian contacts that several of the places there are named after Sir William Edward Parry, the arctic explorer, and I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few others also commemorate him. But some, such as the streets in Bristol, are more likely to be named after his father, Dr Caleb Hillier Parry, Physician to Bath General Hospital, whose library forms the “Parry Collection” in Bristol University’s Medical Library.

So, once I have set up some web pages to collect and list all of these places, perhaps there should be an ongoing competition amongst the more “famous” Parrys – to see which of them has the most places named after them.