Welcome. Thank you for visiting my site. While here you can read about my books, learn a little more about the things that are important to me, and browse my collection of down-home recipes.
You can also read my occasional ramblings that will nearly always include my dog, Josephine, as well as other family members.
And you can learn about Compassion, Samaritan's Purse, and other charitable groups and see what you can do to help others less fortunate.
I'm very proud of all of my books. I had a reason for writing each one. I was pregnant with my first child when I quickly became frustrated with the typical baby name books that I had. I wanted to see just Irish names and just Hawaiian names - in other words, names separated by cultural group. I looked everywhere for a book like that, but to no avail. I ended up keeping a binder of every name I came across and separated the names as I'd wanted - into groups.
I quickly became interested in the names' roots and original meanings and began researching in earnest. The results of years of research can be found in A World of Baby Names.
My second book was The African-American Baby Name Book. The idea for this book came while I was researching A World of Baby Names. Representation of African-American names in traditional baby books was almost nil. There just weren't any of the unique creations typically found in the pool of "black" names. I couldn't believe that these creative names weren't recorded - neither for baby name selection let alone cultural record. I wanted to set that record straight.
The idea for my third book, Names through the Ages, stemmed from my love of reading historical fiction. After I'd done all that research on the first two books, I knew which names were being used correctly and which weren't. I knew that certain names were outlawed, and that life events played a direct role in which names were used in various time periods. Though many of us never get beyond knowing what our first names mean, the study of onomastics (naming) really is an interesting one.