This has to be a sign.....

OK, I know I said I wasn't going to think about names for a while in the hopes that one would jump out at me as being the right one, and maybe one actually has and I just haven't been paying attention. This is too cool! For the past few weeks I have been trying to find out the middle name of my great-aunt who died when she was very young. I was sort of wondering if there were any family names that we hadn't considered. I had already asked my Mom, and she couldn't remember Aunt Margaret's middle name. Anyway, just for fun, I decided to Google my great-aunts first and last name with some other info to see if anything came up with her middle name. I ended up finding a website containing my entire family tree (my mom's mother's lineage), traced back for the last few hundred years (I have ancestors who fought in the Battle of Gettysburg!). Apparently someone (or more likely several people) have spent a lot of time putting together a huge website with all of my mother's lineage. It is pretty unusual to have your entire geneology handed to you when you type in a four-word Google search, but that is exactly what happened. I still found nothing on Great Aunt Margaret's middle name, but here is the cool thing.... I was looking at the names for my Great-great-grandmothers and found that one of their sisters was named Lucy Elena. The name Elena nearly jumped off the page at me. I can't believe that the name that Amelia has been insisting on for her sister is actually a family name. I don't think it was even all that common back in the 1800's when they were named. My Mom remembers her Great Great Aunt Lucy from when she was a kid, and I actually feel close to the women from her generation because at least two of them, Ida and Addie, were quilters, and I have inherited their quilts and have always felt a link with them because of that. So maybe there really was a reason why the name Elaina (or Elena) has been popping out at me all over the place. Now even my ancestors are throwing it at us! Maybe it really is the right name for our daughter.

And just as cool, I also discovered that my Great Uncle Olin's middle name was Clare, one of the middle names we have considered all along! We had all kinds of signs while we waited for Amelia. Maybe I just need to start paying attention to them again!