Or how to confuse your descendants:
1. Thou shalt name your male children, James, John, Joseph, Josiah, Abel Richard, Thomas, William, Thou shalt name thy female children, Elizabeth, Mary, Martha, Maria, Sarah, Ida, Virginia, May.
2. Thou shalt leave no trace of your female children
3. Thou shalt, after naming your children from the above list call them by strange nicknames such as Ike, Eli, Polly, Dolly or Sukey making them difficult to trace.
4. Thou shalt NOT use any middle names on any legal documents or census reports and only where necessary, you may use only initials on legal documents.
5. Thou shalt learn to sign all documents illegibly, so that your surname can be spelled or misspelled in various ways; Hicks, Hix, Hixe, etc.
6. Thou shalt after no more than 3 generations, make sure that all family records are lost, misplaced, burned in a courthouse fire or buried so that NO future trace of them can be found.
7. Thou shalt propogate misleading legends, rumors and vague innuendos regarding your place of origin.
a. You come from: Eng. Ireland, Scotland
b. You may have American Indian ancestry of the______tribe.
c. You may have descended from 3 brothers that come over from_____
8. Thou shalt leave NO cemetery records or headstones with legible names.
9. Thou shalt leave NO family Bible with records of birth marriages or deaths
10. Thou shalt ALWAYS flip thy name around. If born James, Albert thou must make all the rest of thy records in the names of Albert, AJ, JA AL, Bert, Bart or Alfred.
11. Thou shalt always flip thy parent's names when making reference to them, although "Unknown" or a blank space is an acceptable alternative.
12. Thou shalt name at least 5 generations of males and dozens of their cousins with idential names in order to totally confuse researchers.