family prayer

Zachias Asbury Dowling, a circuit riding Methodist preacher, married Adelaide Josephus Glenn, one of his parishioners. Adelaide Glenn and her sisters, Barbara
Herndon Glenn and Claudia Glenn, were descended from James Elizabeth Glenn (no shit), who was a missionary to the Indians before he settled Glenville, Alabama, which is down past Montgomery.
Anyway, suffice it to say that it was a very Christian household. The family prayer during the Civil War era went:
"Dear Lord, please keep us safe from the Yankees and the Baptists."
To Zachias and Adelaide were born a boy, Herndon Glenn Dowling, my grandfather (who married Ada Camp—that's where the Camps come in), and three girls: Mabel, Lily and Claude. Adelaide and her three spinster daughters lived in Birmingham until they dropped off, one by one. When my father, Herndon Glenn Dowling Jr., was visiting the maiden ladies as a teenager once, he asked a neighborhood girl out to the movies. Claude went into a flap: "You can't go on a date with that girl. She's Eyetalian!"
Claude Dowling willed her portrait of Claudia Glenn, her diamond ring and a locket with somebody's hair in it to me. She would be rolling in her grave had she known her namesake became a Yankee and married a Jew. And there, standing in front of the portrait of Claudia Glenn (not that you can see it), is Claude's great great niece (and Claudia Glenn's great great great niece) (and Claudia Glenn Dowling's daughter) with her husband who has a Camp somewhere in his lineage. Yankee Camps.
But not a one of us is Baptist.