Aaron was looking around on familysearch.org today and found this ancestor of his. The name drew his attention, because we have been putting together a list of potential baby names. We always use a family name as the middle, and we have been considering Ross, which is my dad's middle name. So as Aaron was looking around in family search and came across a surname Ross in his family line, it caught his eye. We looked at Nephi Ross first, but there wasn't much about him, so we went back to his father, Daniel, who had a picture and a biography. We started reading his biography, and it was pretty incredible! This is what I posted on Instagram about it:
This is Daniel Ross Jr. He is Aaron's triple-great grandpa. Daniel and his brother were Scottish sailors and traveled all over the world. They were captured by pirates and spent 2 years as pirate slaves until they were rescued by a US ship. They returned to Scotland and their family. But soon heard about the gold rush in CA, and headed out again, promising to bring home enough gold to move the entire family to the US. They sailed to Panama, walked across it, then on to CA. They panned $20,000 worth of gold out of a lake and used it to bring their family to UT. Daniel and his wife helped settle Iron County, but the heat didn't agree with him, so they headed north to settle Muskrat Springs......which later became Hooper, the tiny farm town I grew up in. Daniel (Aaron's ancestor, not mine) is buried in the same cemetery as my dad. You guys, family history is COOL. And the "random" connections blow my mind sometimes.
So ya, that was the Instagram version.....I had to paraphrase and cut a TON out of the story to make it fit. But if I peaked your interest, the whole five pages worth is below. But I just can't get over how cool this connection is. Aaron and I are the only two people in the whole world who connect to this ancestor in this way, but that's amazing to me! Aaron's family never thought twice about Daniel being buried in Hooper to them it was just some random podunk town. And my family never would have cared about Daniel being buried in the same cemetery as my dad, because to them Daniel is just some other guy buried in the cemetery among hundreds of others. But when you put Aaron's family history and my family history together, suddenly there is this super cool connection. And that connection will be there for our kids too. Which, in my mind, solidifies the need to use Ross somehow as part of this new baby's name.
I don't know how yet, because Ross Swan sounds awful. Like Raw Swan. There's too much "S" going on. But I can't ignore how awesome this family discovery is, nor the timing of it. So I think we'll make Ross work as a name one way or another. That's the plan right now, anyway.
