family tree

I have lots of pictures to post from our weekend and the Fourth of July, but those will have to wait until tonight when I have some time to sort through them, but in order to keep the well from running dry, I thought I would post something else of interest.

For those of you not familiar, my church is very in to genealogy. Because of this, I have luckily grown up knowing a lot about my ancestors and their families. For the last couple of months I have been hearing about an online tool called familysearch.org . This program basically lets you look up relatives by names and you can trace your family tree back to the 1500s or so depending on how complete your information is. Since we are still searching for baby names, I thought it might be cool to look back at some family names as options so the other week I logged on and started plugging in names of my grandparents and other ancestors, just to see what I could come up with. I need to preface this by saying that many of my ancestors were puritan pilgrims and Dutch immigrants so the further back I went the more interesting names I found, such as:

Alford, Thomasin, Mellyor, Admonition, Giulielmi, Atkinson, Gyles, Easter, Hosea, Freeborn, Barronet, Joost, Petrus, Tannetgen - you get the picture, not necessarily names we are considering :)

Anyway, most of the names I found were traditional but it is interesting to trace your roots back and see the dates and places some of your ancestors lived, and if your genealogy isn't very complete, well then you just found a new project to take on. Go check this site out, it is really interesting, and if nothing else you can search for potential baby names.