The three Peggys — Peggy McMaster, Peggy Yeoman, Peggy Arnold

Three Peggys, one generation, two sides of one road

Three women named Peggy circulated through the Eesley side of this family across one generation. They were unrelated to each other — one married into the line from a Pittsburgh-suburb Pennsylvania family, one married into the line from Don’s wife’s side, and one was the neighbor on Highland Ridge Road in Lowell whose house was a hundred yards from ours. All three were called Peggy. None of the three was a Margaret in the way the Mary Eesley Bean register of names treats first names — Margaret was the formal version; Peggy was the name they actually lived under.

• Margaret Jane “Peggy” (McMaster) Eesley (1914–2007) — Will’s Peggy. My grandmother. From Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, Penn State ‘36, Home Economics teacher, lifelong member of First Congregational UCC in Marietta, the figurehead of the Eesley side in her generation.
• Margaret Adelyne “Peggy” (Youman) Eesley (b. 1913) — Don’s Peggy. Born one year and three months before Will’s Peggy. The other Eesley-side Peggy of the same generation, distinguished in family memory by the name of the brother she married. Mother of five children with Don, including Charles Stuart Eesley (b. 1955), the other Charles in Don’s family.
• Peggy Arnold — the Arnolds’ Peggy. The nearest neighbor on Highland Ridge Road, married to John Arnold. Not blood family. Counted as family in everything that mattered.

The pattern, drawn out:

Peggy	Born	Connection	Husband	Generation
Margaret Jane (McMaster)	1914	Married Will Eesley 1942 (Chuck’s grandmother)	Will Eesley	5
Margaret Adelyne (Youman)	1913	Married Don Eesley	Don Eesley	5
Peggy Arnold	(dates not yet on file)	Highland Ridge neighbor	John Arnold	6 (roughly Will-and-Peggy’s children’s generation)

The name Peggy is the standard English diminutive of Margaret — itself the standard English form of the Latin Margarita meaning pearl — and was overwhelmingly the most common female name in middle-American households of the 1910s and 1920s. The American naming dictionaries of the period have Margaret in the top three female given names for most of those years, with Peggy as the universally-used short form. Two unrelated Eesley-side women getting the same diminutive in the same generation is therefore not surprising as statistics. Three Peggys around one Highland Ridge road — that is closer to the surprise.

Will’s Peggy — the figurehead

My grandmother Peggy McMaster is the longest-running of the three Peggys in this archive, by a long way. She finished high school at fifteen, went to Penn State at seventeen, graduated 1936, taught Home Economics in Butler, Pennsylvania, married my grandfather Will Eesley in 1942, raised their four children (my father Charlie included), taught Home Economics again at Marietta High School in the early 1960s, sat for years on the Dana Philathia Class and as director of Christian education at First Congregational UCC Marietta, and held the 424 N 7th Street house as the after-school home of half my childhood. She lived 92 years; she died at Harmar Place in 2007 with my father visiting her daily after work in her final stretch.

Two lines about her run through this archive more than anything else. The first is from her own girlhood at Penn State, the only sentence the family memory preserves from her before she met Will: “I never lacked for a dance partner.” The second is from my eulogy for my father, about the line from her investing to my own education: “the figurehead that my grandmother was in our family … her wisdom, far-sightedness and patience in investing inspired him to become a stockbroker, funded my grandparents’ travel in retirement, and paid for a large part of my education.” The continuity between her Home Economics teaching and her investing was exact: a household economist on the home side, a portfolio strategist on the capital side — one practice, two scales.

She is also the Peggy who supplied the McMaster middle name to my father in 1947 — carrying her own family’s surname across the generation into Charles McMaster Eesley’s name — which is the subject of the Three Charleses essay. The two essays sit beside each other for that reason.

Don’s Peggy — the parallel

Will’s brother Don married his own Peggy — Margaret Adelyne Youman, born one year and three months before Will’s Peggy on 24 June 1913 — and the Eesleys of generation 5 thereby had two Peggys at once. The family distinguished them, exactly as you’d expect, by the brother each had married: Will’s Peggy and Don’s Peggy. Don’s Peggy raised five children — Lyle Stuart (named for Don’s brother who died at Cabanatuan), Robert Douglas, Marilyn, Charles Stuart, and Donald Steven — and lived in Tulsa with Don in his later years. The Charles Stuart in the line above is the fourth Charles to circulate through the Eesley family of this generation, after Charles Leonard, Charles McMaster my father, and me — named, again, for the grandfather Charles Leonard, in the same naming-after-the-grandfather pattern the Three Charleses essay traces.

Don’s Peggy and Will’s Peggy appear together in the late-1940s family group portrait at Charles Leonard’s Bexley home, and in the c. 1971–1972 Highland Ridge reunion portrait at Will’s place, where Roberta’s labeled caption distinguishes them by their husbands’ first names. The two Peggys lived their adult lives in different Ohio cities — Marietta and Tulsa — and were brought together at the family reunions that became annual after Charles Leonard’s October 1972 death.

Peggy Arnold — the household one hundred yards away

The third Peggy is the one who is not in the GEDCOM tree by descent but is in my eulogy for my father by choice. Peggy Arnold and her husband John lived on Highland Ridge Road in Lowell, a hundred yards away as the nearest neighbors, in the small cluster of houses Will had designed and built around the family’s own. My father’s tractor flipped over on him once; John Arnold came over and lent a helping hand. My father’s eulogy was explicit about the household:

Our nearest neighbors were over a hundred yards away, but John and Peggy Arnold were a thousand times closer to us in times of need than my neighbors since, who lived only feet away. John Arnold came and lent a helping hand on many occasions, and in emergencies such as when Dad flipped the tractor over on himself. The lessons on life and hard work that I learned in their house from their family complemented the lessons I learned from Dad and have been valuable to me ever since.

Peggy Arnold is the kinship-as-mutual-aid thread on the neighborhood side — the same practice that runs through the Davis-side Unionville-fire story in Robert Earl’s 1990 Heritage and through the long Wolfe-Wildermuth visiting tradition that survives in my mother Terrie’s 2017 obituary. The Arnold-Eesley neighbor relationship is its Marietta-County 1980s instance.

She does not appear in the structured-genealogy index of the family. She appears in the eulogy by name, twice. The two registers — the structured tree and the spoken record — carry different definitions of family, and Peggy Arnold sits in the second register the way the first register can only signal but not contain.

What the pattern is doing

Three Peggys is not, strictly, a name-pattern with deliberate intent the way the Three Charleses was. There is no naming-after-the-Peggy-before going on. Will and Don did not name their wives; the wives came into the family already named. Peggy Arnold came into the neighborhood by her own family’s choice of name and by marriage to John. The pattern is instead a demographic coincidence with social weight: the most common female given name of an era happening to land on three women all of whom became central to the same family-and-neighborhood compound on a single rural Ohio road.

Two readings of the coincidence are worth keeping side by side:

First, it tells you something about American naming statistics in the 1910s. Margaret-and-Peggy dominated female naming through the years when these three women were born, the way Charles dominated male naming in the same decade. A household with three Peggys in the surrounding social ring is consistent with what 1913–1914 American naming charts predict.

Second, it tells you something about the household as the unit of family. The structured-genealogy version of the Eesley line lists Will’s Peggy and Don’s Peggy because they married into the bloodline. Peggy Arnold is not in the genealogy at all. But the operational family — the one I describe in my eulogy — includes all three. The household that meets at family-reunion volume at Highland Ridge on a summer weekend in 1973 holds Will’s Peggy at the center, Don’s Peggy visiting from Tulsa, and Peggy Arnold over from a hundred yards away. All three Peggys are at the gathering. The archive’s structured layer can carry only two of them; its narrative layer can carry all three; the gathering itself carried all three without needing to distinguish.

The Three Charleses essay made the case that a family name is a one-line document handed down to a child for the rest of their life. The Three Peggys essay makes a smaller and quieter case: a neighborhood is a similar one-line document. The fact that three women named Peggy populated one stretch of rural Marietta-County road across one generation is not a planned pattern. It is what home looked like for the next generation that grew up there. The pattern of the name is incidental; the texture of the gathering is the document.

Written by Chuck Eesley, June 2026 — a short companion piece to the Three Charleses essay and the family-threads essay. Many thanks to Roberta Burnes, whose June 2026 email re-opened the Highland Ridge annual-reunion tradition and surfaced the social rhythm that ran through Will and Peggy’s summers across the back half of the 1970s.