InsaneJournal

Family dramas
From the annals of randomness:

My brother's middle name is Alexander. Alexander is a family name - he was named for my mother's ancestor*, who was named for his ancestor, who was named for his father Alec.

The only thing is, Alec wasn't really Alec at all. Before he moved into the area where they then lived and married his wife, he was known as Amos Gerard, and had had another wife entirely. If I recall the story correctly he may have been an army deserter as well (my mother would know but checking would probably result in an hour's lesson about family history) but he was certainly a marriage deserter, which I'm not sure his second wife ever found out - though she did discover that his name was not Alec Goring, and there's a story that she went to the priest wanting to have the marriage annulled because he wasn't the man she'd married, but was told that she married the man, not the name. (As far as I know the marriage was fine after that, but she may have secretly hated him. They had children, anyway, and one of their...granddaughters, I think, was the first female something-or-rather-political in New Zealand - she has a biography, which does not mention the bigomy.)

*I'm not sure of the exact line of descent, but it can't have been direct as my mother's maiden name is Miller, not Goring, and I don't believe her mother's is either. Or Gerard, for that matter.