Lydia was an Iron Age kingdom of western Asia Minor, now part of modern Turkey. Its population spoke an Anatolian language in the Indo-European language family known as Lydian, which became extinct in the first century BC. Coins were invented in Lydia around 610 BC.
Lydia was also a rich businesswoman of Thyatira in modern Greece, who appears in the Biblical book of Acts. She housed the apostle Paul and his colleagues. Ah, that money linkage.
The church that I went to as a child in Binghamton, NY, Trinity AME Zion, was two very short blocks away, down Gaines Street over Oak Street, to the corner of Oak and Lydia. On weekdays, I would walk down Lydia, zigzag five more short blocks to my school, Daniel S. Dickinson.
Yet none of that, save for the vague recollection about the New Testament woman, was consciously in my mind when we decided to name our daughter Lydia five and a half years ago.
Here are pics from her first two and a quarter years; the last picture was developed 6 July 2006. Some of the earlier pics I never used in the blog before.
And a more recent shot, from her fourth birthday party:
ROG