Talking 'Bout My Generations

In the sermon yesterday, the preacher was talking about leaving a legacy. He asked everyone that knew the names of their parents to stand up. Then he said if you knew the names of all four grandparents, to remain standing. Quite a few people sat down. Then he said if you knew the names of all eight great-grandparents to reamain standing. There were maybe 10 of us that were still standing in a room of around 300 people. I was actually pretty surprised. I figured there would be a lot more than that.

Of course, once we sat down, I started running through the names and couldn't remember two. I knew I knew them, and finally remembered them after spending the rest of the sermon thinking about it. I even know most of the maiden names and some middle names. I have a one track mind and it was set on auto pilot; I couldn't pull it back to the sermon. And then I started going through Chris' great-grandparents and could name all of his maternal ones, but couldn't quite remember the paternal ones. I got home and quickly looked them up and felt much better.

Anyway...... the point of the sermon (I think) was that in four generations, even your own family probably won't even know your name. It's important to make sure what you believed in is passed on after your gone. Your legacy is passed on through those that you bring to Christ. At least that's what I got out of it. Of course, during class, we always have a person from the praise team come and lead songs with the kids and she asked "What word did all of the songs we sang have in them and what did Carl preach about this morning?" I was like, "uh, I dunno". And the answer was joy, so maybe I totally missed the point of that sermon.

I'm really interested in my genealogy. I don't know why, but after having my own child I see such value in remembering the past. I think that's why I love that Clara has two of her great-grandmother's names. I hope that she wants to know all about them once she's older. If we do have more children, I want them all to have family names somewhere in their name. I also love the idea of passing things on and having traditions and stories to share with the next generation. I love that Chris' mom has started a blog. In the short couple of weeks she's written, I've already learned things about her that I didn't know. Now if I could just get my mom on here.

On my dad's side of the family, there was a tradition of naming children with double initials for a couple of generations. I believe my great-grandfather and his siblings, as well as my grandfather and his all have double initials. My great-grandfather was Lemuel Lamar and my grandpa was Vernon Verome. It kinda ended there, but my name is Kelsey Kristine and I have a couple of cousins with double initials. If we have a child that we can't think of a good family name for, I'd like to at least do the initial thing.