Family Connections? Not Necessarily

Starting with me, my middle name is Gerald. That was my Dad’s first name and in his generation it was very traditional to give the first born son their name as the son’s middle name. Interestingly, it wasn’t the case for the first born daughter and I suppose this reflects the status of women at the time and arguably currently. So, my wife doesn’t have her Mother’s first name as her middle name, which is very fortunate for her as her Mother was called Doris!! I got huge amounts of stick for my middle name and she would have had even more.

Our oldest son has my first name as his middle name since we decided to follow tradition on that. Our second son has the middle name Michael because that was the name I really wanted to give him for a long while. When we decided on a different name we decided that we would use Michael as his middle name. The same principle held with our oldest daughter, whose middle name of Louise was, once again, something of a front runner for a while and so we wanted to acknowledge that. Our youngest daughter has the middle name Grace after her great grandmother, the finest woman you could imagine. Determined and hard working, she lived up to her first name in every possible way. Of all the people I have known, only Janet matches her spirit and her huge reserves of common sense.