Sunday, April 22, 2007

New Prompt (Week Sixteen) at AnceStories2

I've just posted the newest set of journal prompts over at AnceStories2: Stories of Me for My Descendants. This week's topic is Your Children.

I thought I'd share a little about my children: I have two, a sixteen-year-old daughter and a thirteen-year-old son. My daughter, Melissa "Missy" Joy, was named for a character in a favorite book, Love Comes Softly, by Janette Oke. I read it back when it was the first and only book the author had written. It became a series, and she became a pioneer in the Christian Fiction field. When Love Comes Softly became a movie created by Hallmark, the father's character was played by Dale Midkiff. For years, people have asked if my children's father s family was related to the actor. Recently, I made contact with a step-relative of Dale's who had done quite a bit of genealogy on his family. She was able to show me that he descended from an ancestor who has a descendant that has taken a YDNA test for our Midkiff Family Tree DNA Project. There are three or four "distinct" Midkiff families who have members who have taken the YDNA test and the results show that there is a definite connection between them all, as early as the late 1700s. So, yes, Dale is related, but we're not sure how, as we can't seem to get past my children's father's 3rd-great-grandfather Midkiff.

My son, Matthew Jon, was named at the last minute. I was walking the halls of Sacred Heart Medical Center in early labor and I suggested to my son's father that we had better make sure we had a boy's name, just in case (we had decided upon Mandy for a girl's name). Good thing we came up with one! I like to say that Matthew was named after me, as that would have been my name if I had been a boy. Besides, he had to be named after me; he certainly couldn't be named before me! (I know, I know, bad joke!)

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