Naming your child is harder than it looks! Tyler and I have been going back and forth on names, and after many suggestions I turned to family history. I knew I didn’t just want to “pick” a name I liked – I wanted to learn the story behind the name. It didn’t have to be anyone famous, but I didn’t want to name Jack after someone we didn’t know anything about.

I browsed my mom’s family history books and asked stories about my dad’s. Nothing inspired me. Now this isn’t to say our side of the family isn’t cool enough, just nothing struck me this time around. I knew I was looking in the wrong place. (Tyler’s dad once told me that he believes a name is extremely important, and has prayed about each and every one of their childrens’ names. He told me we’ll just know if it’s right, and I agree.)

Then we turned to Tyler’s genealogy chart (new.familysearch.org) and I browsed his Mom’s line. A few lines back, her ancestors in the mid-1800s had the surname of Dalton. I immediately liked that name and felt like I should do more research with that specific family. My sister Courtney suggested googling a name, and most likely someone will have written about him/her. Thus, I googled Edward Dalton and read his entire life history that someone had compiled. Turns out Edward Dalton was the first in Tyler’s mom’s line to join the church! He brought the entire Dalton line to the gospel of Jesus Christ – how neat is that? Without this conversion, Tyler and I wouldn’t be married for time and all eternity.

But it doesn’t stop there. Some of my family spent the day in Old Town, San Diego on Tuesday and we finished up by touring the new Mormon Battalion museum. (Which, on another note, I highly recommend. It is free, newly remodeled, and was so neat and interactive! The guide told us most people think Disney designed it!) At the end of the tour, I hopped on their computer to casually browse through the list of soldiers who volunteered, and the name Dalton caught my eye. Edward Dalton. Could it really be the same Edward Dalton??

I emailed the information to myself, and upon further investigation it is the same Edward Dalton! How neat! I honestly can’t wait until Jack is old enough and we can take him to visit the museum and learn about his ancestors! Lesson learned: research pays off! (It is also neat to consider the fact that if I hadn’t been researching the Daltons the very day before we went to the Mormon Battalion museum, I wouldn’t have ever discovered the connection. I still could have come across the Daltons in my google search and learned about his conversion to the gospel, but I wouldn’t have known for years – if ever – that he was also a part of the Mormon Battalion and that museum was about him and his friends and family! God works in amazing ways. Nothing is coincidence, friends.)