What's in a name?

Naming Jacob was surprisingly one of the easiest things that Josh and I have ever had to do. We considered only a few other options, but we just kept coming back to Baby Jake. The only reasons we ever considered changing our minds was that 1) Jacob is a heathen in the Bible and his name even means "deceiver" and 2) Jacob has been the most popular boy's name in the United States for the past three years. But then we decided that a name's meaning doesn't automatically make the person turn out to be that way and neither one of us really know that many kids named Jake. No matter what you name your kid, chances are there is another one of them in the world. Unless you name them something weird like Moxie Crimefighter, which totally isn't our style. We love our kid far too much for that.

But back to my point...

About a week ago, Josh signed up for Ancestory.com and started researching our family history. If you've never been on that site, I have to admit that it's incredibly cool. We found all kinds of census records, birth and death certificates, and even a couple of old pictures that had been scanned in- one of his grandfather from his high school yearbook and one of my grandfather in his military uniform. Neat stuff. And through the program, Josh was able to do about a decade of research in a couple of hours and traced his lineage (I know my whole family will read that word the wrong way... I can hardly type it without laughing) to the members of the family that came over from Europe. He's known for years that two brothers came over and migrated to the Carolinas, but what we found out was this: there were actually three brothers and the father came along with them. And the father's name? Jacob. Little did we know we picked the name of the very first Mauney to make his way over to America. How perfect is that?

Now we just have one problem... my husband now has to cope with the fact that he's French. I told him that I'll still love him anyway. Sadly we know nothing about French heritage except for the song that the chef sings in The Little Mermaid. And that perhaps we should start drinking more wine. That stuff counts as culture, right???


*And as a sidenote, the photo is courtesy of the very lovely and talented Jan Scott who took all of our maternity pictures (which we love!). You should check her out at www.janscottphotography.com.