Announcing...

We would like to introduce you to our son, Thomas Emery Daily, who was born on Saturday, 22 November 2008, at 2:12 a.m.

Thomas' name came about in interesting ways. Back on September 12th, I had a dream. Mary Anne, Tim's mother, was pushing an old fashioned baby carriage, with Tim walking beside her. They approached me, I believe I was laying in a hospital bed. Mary Anne asked me, "Would you like to meet baby Tom?" I looked up at Tim and said, "That isn't one of our name choices!" [It wasn't.] And he said sheepishly, "It was in the spirit of the moment." Tom is the name of Tim's father.

Then in October, we were at a Halloween party. Other guests were interested in knowing gender, names, due dates, etc. but all we could tell them was that the baby was due to be born on Thanksgiving Day. One of the women said, "You should name your baby Tom, then, if it is a boy." She was referring to a Tom Turkey, but at first I didn't get that. I just was stunned she picked the name Tom. Within two days, a second person also said we should name the baby Tom if it was a boy.

We still did not change our name list, where we had the name Thomas as one of the middle name options. Once, in early November, Tim and I sat at the dinner table and pulled out our name list and went through them again. We were leaning heavily towards the name Nolan Michael for a boy. But nothing seemed exactly right. When people would ask if we had picked a name, yet, I would say we had a list of six boys' and six girls' names, but none were anything we absolutely loved. We just felt we had to meet baby.

The week our son was born, though, I began to think about that name Thomas. At the bottom of our list of names, I scribbled down "Thomas Emery" even though Emery had never been one of our choices, either. (It had been nixed during our initial collaboration.)

So on Saturday morning, when someone in the delivery room announced, "It's a boy!" (I never did see him naked until I was looking at photos that night by myself), we knew the count was on to get him named. After I sent out the first birth announcement, we were soon inundated with name options. Two of them included the name Thomas. The funniest one was "Thomas Brady Daily" suggested by Tim's former boss, Rich, an avid Patriots fan. When Tim told me the name en route to see Thomas at Children's Mercy on Saturday afternoon, I thought, how interesting, he picked the name Thomas. I did not make the connection to the quarterback's name being Tom Brady!

As Tim and I sat alone with our son, I asked, "So what are you thinking of for his name?" Tim told me he had asked our boy what name to call him when he was alone with him in the early morning hours. But that since I "did all the work", I should name him. But I smiled and said, "No, he is our son. Let's decide together." And he said he liked the name Thomas. We had not talked yet about naming him that, so it was a very good moment. I told Tim that I agreed, and our son had a first name.

The middle name was a little trickier. I told Tim I really liked a family name, Emery, but that I also was debating using the name Edmund. We had really wanted to use Michael, but that just didn't seem to go, now. A fourth choice we tossed around was Murphy. So two Ms and two Es (T.M.D. or T.E.D.). So I said to Tim that I would call my brother Paul that night and find out how he felt about his middle name, which is Emery.

Paul told me that while growing up, he didn't like it, especially since he didn't even know "who" Emery was! But that he had grown used to it now. When I told him the choices, he said he liked the flow of Thomas Emery better than Thomas Edmund, even though he thought Edmund had a more tangible link to our family. (Edmund is my father's father's name.) Our first link into the Emery family, which settled in America in 1635, is my father's great grandmother, "Grammy Kate", or Katherine Imogene (Emery) Stevens (photo taken c. 1925). My dad's mother Olive had a brother named Clayton Emery Buck, we knew him as "Uncle Clayt" growing up. Olive then chose the name Emery for the middle name of her son, my father's brother, David Emery Cullivan. My dad continued the tradition and named his eldest son Paul Emery, this is my brother. There is a free downloadable copy of the Emery genealogical history online at Google Books: Genealogical Records of Descendants of John and Anthony Emery, of Newbury, Mass. 1590-1890.

The name Thomas might seem to point most obviously to Tim's father, Thomas. But since I am a genealogist, what I find really neat about it is that Thomas is the name of the father of the first Daily immigrant to America, Peter Daily, who arrived in Boston, MA about 1835. A verbal history by one of Peter's granddaughters stated the following: "Peter Dailey was born in County Longford, Ireland, in the year 1804. He was the son of Thomas Dailey, who was a schoolteacher, and his second wife, name unknown. Thomas Dailey and his first wife had five sons and they were grown men when Thomas remarried after the death of his first wife. Peter was their only son and Thomas died when Peter was two years old." Peter's son John named one of his twin sons Thomas. Tim's father, Tom, was named for this man, his grandfather (see photo, taken in Indiana in 1909). The name Thomas means "twin" in Greek. Our little Thomas could have been a twin also, as he was one of two embryos that we transferred back in March. I like that little twist to the meaning behind his name, too. So Tom's grandson was named for him, just as he had been named for his grandfather. Another cute little fact is that our baby son now has both of my brothers' middle names! (My brother Brian is named Brian Thomas.)

Sorry for the long dissertation on his name, but as a genealogist, I couldn't resist!