About a month ago I dove into the web 2.0 fun of genealogies with Geni.com. Since then my family tree has grown to include 1,800+ family members (which I believe puts us in the top 100 for Geni.com family trees, at least as of June 12) going back 48 generations to A.D. 314.

I found most of the information online, so it’s of questionable accuracy. I think anything going back to A.D. 314 would be of questionable accuracy. Here’s the short version: Several writers, a few massacres, a whole lot of dying in battle and then a kidnapping that created Ireland’s most-beloved missionary (how’s that for putting a positive spin on it?).

But if the stories are true…

Continue reading Fun Stories in my Family History →

Ah, web 2.0 has finally hit the old skool field of genealogies. Enter Geni.com.

It’s a site that lets you enter your family tree–and we’re talking more than just straight lines back. It’s got siblings and cousins and in-laws and exes and the whole shebang. Plus when you add people you can invite them to help you add to the family tree. So now it’s no longer a single random relative maintaining the family records, but everybody can pool their resources, collect all the info and keep it going for future generations. It’s free (currently ad supported and will probably later add additional features for a fee) and you can print out or export your tree, so you’re not locked in to their system.

Continue reading Family Trees Made Fun →

Uncle Mike, originally uploaded by Kevin D. Hendricks.

This is Lexi being held for the first time by her beaming Uncle Mike during our recent trip to Green Bay. Gotta love that smile.

With fear and trembling I expected the day when fatherhood would be a short nine months away. Who knew it would come with a ‘wahoo’ some weeks ago? Of course fear and trembling came shortly afterward, but there’s plenty of joy and excitement as well. We finally broke the silence yesterday when we told my parents and now I feel like we’re telling random strangers on the street, which I suppose I am with this.

We’re about 11 weeks along now, which makes January 22, 2006 the big day. A baby. Parenthood. Wow.

Continue reading Just Call Me Dad →

So much for that weekend trip to Green Bay to hang with the fam. Despite the 21 inches of snow southern Minnesota received today, we scoffed at the mere inch or two in the Cities and loaded up the car to head out this afternoon. Two hours later when we hadn’t hit Menomenie we decided we better turn back.

On the plus side, it’ll be easier to try and score some U2 tickets tomorrow at, um, 11:00 a.m.

I’ve never much understood Christians who want to pull their kids out of public school. It seems like such a cop out to think schools are so far gone you have to pull your kids out. If every Christian family pulls their kids out and doesn’t have any parental involvement, what do you expect to happen? I’ve never been very impressed with Christian schools on any level either, nor understood justifying the expense. And homeschool. Wow, that takes a special kid.

Tony Jones summed up the whole thing in words I haven’t come up with yet.

A rescheduled quasi-confirmed interview that has yet to materialize has kept me from getting real work done this afternoon. Well, billable work. I have been reading A Generious Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren (Amazon has an understandably hard time with his ridiculously long subtitle), in between checking my computer for updates, reading random articles about the new U2 album, and noticing that everyone in my blogging circle is posting an entry about the new U2 iPod video. (me, Steve, Josh, Neal. C’mon who’s next? Tim? Andrew? Speak? Maybe Church Marketing Sucks could find a way to talk about it.)

McLaren makes an intriguing point in his chapter “Why I Am Green” (which sadly does not contain the line “It’s not easy being green”) about the family (and yes, I am getting to a real point in this entry. For the record, I’d like to blame the preposterous number of parenthetical thoughts in this entry on McLaren, who has 148 footnotes in a 300-page book, most of which are side comments and not technically footnotes. I’d hate to count how many parenthetical thoughts he has.):

“Even our family systems will need reconsideration. For example, we may realize that the nuclear family (of so much Christian focus) and “subatomic family” (i.e., the nuclear family further split by divorce) both require (and waste) more resources than the traditional family — the extended or “molecular” one. Could extended families and intentional households ever make a comeback? If they do, it will be good news for all of creation — including humans.”

See what I mean? Three parenthetical thoughts in one sentence. And this guy has a degree in English. There’s hope for us all.

But I had a point: Molecular familes.

Continue reading The Molecular Family →