Adam Nagourney writes in the New York Times on the election for Senator in Massachusetts

Our relatives (once, twice, and three times removed) and many others in the US were watching the results of the Massachusetts election yesterday for the open Senate seat held formerly by the now-deceased Ted Kennedy.

Adam Nagourney in today's New York Times writes about the outcome of this election in a news analysis with Scott Brown, a Republican, winning the Senate seat over Martha Coakley, a Democrat. The comments that follow this article are also quite interesting. This news story with large political (and other) ramifications has overtaken the Haiti earthquake disaster on several news sites.

I regularly get asked whether Adam Nagourney is a relative of ours and although there are quite a few "Nagurneys," a surname that I acquired by marrying my husband, as far as we are aware (and his father did some research on this), we don't think that we are related.

The origin of the name is Slavic, and the Ukrainian version would be "Nahirnyj," but the folks at Ellis Island altered it to "Nagurney." In different Slavic languages, the origin is "na hori (Ukrainian)" or "na gori (Russian)," which means "on the mountain." Legend has it that the family farm was on the "side of the hill."