Genealogy and other adventures in real and cyber-space

Yesterday my dad's brother Brent visited, which was cool. My dad gave him the tour of biloxi, and i went too since i hadn't gone yet. There were a lot of really cool houses, and there was a map that showed all the houses that my dad's program had built or are building or helped rebuild and it was a pretty shocking amount, maybe over 100. It's cool that biloxi is going to have this mark left on it by my dad with all these really good houses on stilts. One of the houses was amazing, it was built right around the branches of a tree so as you walked up to it it felt very much like a tree house. Live oak trees, by the way, are amazing. I think they might be some of the coolest trees i've seen, and i've seen lots and lots of trees.

We also ate at The Shed, probably the most southern place i've ever eaten at. It's definitely a place that needs to get featured on that food network show where they go to all those little restaurants...i can't remember what it's called, something, drive in's and dives maybe. Something like that, anyway, it was good stuff. After that we went down to the beach and me and isaac swam. It wasn't really swimming, since after walking out about a hundred yards it was still only 3 feet deep, and i started scaring isaac by talking about sharks so he didn't want to go farther, but it did feel good.

Today, we said goodbye to Brent (the tour was actually today too, somehow it seems like it was a long time ago) and then i've just been meandering about the rest of the day. At some point i posted mission pools on facebook and my family.com, so go one of those places and guess where you think i'm going on my mission. At some point today i googled 'perkes' and found all sorts of cool things. For instance:
According to this site Perkes descend from the Norman noble Perahgoz "lands in Kent by Duke William of Normandy, their liege Lord, for their distinguished assistance at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 A.D." I'm very skeptical of this, since it's a website trying to sell you medieval-esc pictures (they charge you 17 dollars for a digital image) of family crests and the like, but i dunno. According to them our motto is Semper Paratus, making us the boy scouts of the turn of the millenia. I have trouble trusting that would charge anything, let alone 17 dollars, for something with no inherent value or even existance (in this case, a digital image), it also conflicts with the known genealogy of Perkes, which i discovered after that.

I found a website wholly devoted to the name Perkes, specifically the descendants of James Perkes (of which i am part) who left England and Established Hyde Park in Utah and had lots of kids. He was the son of John Perkes, and seems to be the only son who carried the name on (there were lots of daughters, and one guy who's name seems to die off. This could, however, be because that Perkes doesn't have a small army of Mormon Perkes' trying to learn about their genealogy). It is cool though to look at stuff about people you're descended from. Apparently the Perkes heralded from Worcester (which is tricky to say, and can make you appear really stupid to those who know how to say it right), which still has a decent little LDS population. It also has some pretty impressive population density (90,000 people across 12 square miles), but i guess that's somewhat typical of england. So yeah, cool beans. I'd still like to know where the name Perkes actually comes from (i don't buy into that purchase crap) but i'll survive i'm sure.