I thought that my post over the weekend, “The Meda List“, had found the answer to the origin of my wife’s name.

Of course, I gave myself some wiggle room, adding a suggestive sentence at the end of the post:

I haven’t started to claw my way back through the next generation or two of the Morgan and Bishop families, looking for more appearances of the names Almeda or Meda that would further confirm this new origin story.

I was itching to peel back another layer, but instead of starting on the Morgan and Bishop families that had married Menardi men, I decided to take a look at the first Menardi to come to the U.S., Joseph Sebastian Menardi, who sometimes is referred to as Giuseppe Sebastiani Menardi. Late in his life, he married Harriet Granger, who was considerably younger.

And I quickly learned Harriet Granger was the daughter of Roderick Granger Sr. and, are you ready? Almeda Dunlap! Suddenly there was another independent “Meda” to add at the top of the Meda List, challenging my initial answer.

Here’s my problem at this point. There is a lot of potential slippage in this whole story. The genealogical sites use their own search algorithms that don’t always return the same result when the same search terms are used. This makes it harder to replicate findings, or to find bits of information that I recall seeing but didn’t think important enough at the time to include in my notes. Searches in Newspapers.com are subject to similar frustrating peculiarities.

I’m going to have to set this aside for a while until after my upcoming surgery. But I’m sure my curiosity will lure me back to it over the next couple of months.