What's in a (middle) name? Part 2

...a great-grandmother. Amanda's great-grandmother Helene Sisemore Tanner to be exact. Helene, so we are told, was so excited to have a great-granddaughter--Amanda. Fortunately for Helene she got to meet Amanda, but unfortunately for Amanda she never knew it. Amanda was born on November 3, 1979, and Helene died in April of 1980. So, what we know of Helene we've learned from other people and some written history of her. She was born in the 1800's (1896) and lived in Arkansas, Chicago, New York City, and eventually Ponca City, Oklahoma. She attended college, which is rare for her time, and served as a board member and president of art councils, libraries, and historical societies. She was a strong woman (noticing a pattern here?).

Helene, Kate's middle name, is not on any top 100 name lists, but we love it just the same. Again, it's Greek in origin (see Part 1 for my nerdy obsession) and means "Bright One," "Torchlight," or "Illumination." Cool meanings right? For a child that we prayed for as long as we have, to say she is an illumination to our souls would be an understatement. We hope that she will provide light and illumination to a lot of people in her lifetime. I know some of our posts, okay my posts, might insinuate that we have high expectations for her--but really these are merely my hopes for her. She can be whoever she wants to be...my expectations are no exception. Alright, on to the history lesson.

By the way, our Kate officially weighs 6 lbs. 6 ounces today! Two Helene/Helena/Helen stories come to mind:


The first is Helen of Troy (officially Helene of Troy--Greek rendered to English becomes Helen, although Helene is the correct name). Her abduction is what began the famous Trojan war (see Homer's Iliad). History remembers her as having "the face that launched a thousand ships." (picture on left) After seeing Kate, who am I to argue??? ha!

The second is Helena of Constantinople (again the Roman version of the Greek Helene). Helena would later become St. Helena for her role in the movement of the founding of the early Christian church and for an archaeological discovery that would lead to the founding of one of the most well-known churches in the world. While not born into Roman royalty, Helena married a Roman general and had a son that would one day become one of the most important Roman emperors of all time, Constantine. This proved crucial for the early church, because in 312 Constantine ordered all persecution of Christians to stop and declared Christianity the true state religion of the Roman Empire. After this declaration Constantine sent his mother with other historians to Jerusalem to find Christian artifacts. On this trip Helena is credited as finding the "true cross," or the cross of Jesus' crucifixion. On the site where the cross was supposedly discovered, she built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. There is a statue of St. Helena at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome (picture below), and her face was issued on Roman Empire money (see coins below). Her body lies in a sarcophagus in the Vatican to this day. Alright, history lesson over.