Xanthe

Not that it affects your point, but that reminds me that the way the story was originally told, Michael's family name had been Garrison when he worked for the Loves, but he later changed his name to Hudson (making it hard for Marley to track him down). If he had too many links to an existing family, you might have to explain why Donna never had the opportunity to confront him in Bay City earlier. But I suppose it wouldn't be any harder than to explain how Michael found the time between leaving Donna and losing John in Vietnam to force his mother and brother to adopt the name Hudson as well. If they had kept the Garrison name for Michael, I assume Grant and Ryan would never have been called Harrison.

According to the AWHP synopses from 1990, they were in foster care together. I don't think that is inconsistent with the story where she turns out to be Mac's daughter, is it?

Yes. M.J. was mostly involved in police work at first. My dim recollection is that she had a degree in psychology and tried to apply that to a case where someone was stalking Quinn. She had a kind of silent crush on Larry that never went anywhere. Jamie had been mixed up with Stacey Winthrop and then Nicole Love, but both of them had left town. Jamie and M.J. met when she mistook him for a criminal for some reason. Their relationship was pretty low-key and she was charmingly neurotic about it. I liked them together but it didn't set the world on fire and then Jamie left town. I liked Kathleen Layman a lot as M.J. and thought she and Julie Osburn (Kathleen) made terrific sisters, but M.J. didn't get a major storyline until after Sally Spencer took over the role. And I liked Ed Fry as Adam tremendously and his romance with M.J.. I could have lived without Chad Rollo and M.J.'s past as a prostitute (at least as it was written), but on the other hand I adored the scene where Adam had to tell her family he was jilting her without revealing why.

Marley is at least a year older than Cheryl -- if Michael left town say 6 months before Marley was born and Mary came to work one month after Cheryl was born, that could be a gap of at least a year and a half with no overlap. Michael met Mary as Marissa when she turned up in Bay City and he didn't seem to recognize her. Mary left Reginald because he was rotten to the core -- he wasn't written in a way that gave her any justification for being loyal to him after she found out what he had done even though she had apparently loved him up until that point. There was no subtlety about his character and he had no redeeming features. She also didn't just leave him and go back to Vince -- she worked in Vince's restaurant in order to support herself and be around her daughters, and she also went to college. It took some time before she actually got together with Vince. The complexity of her choice wasn't between two husbands -- it was between independence and one husband (and reconciled once she had achieved something like independence and was therefore able to be both independent and have a husband). Regarding Vince's face -- Mary was dead during the first Vince (Jack Ryland) and really only experienced Duke Stroud and Robert Hogan.

Jake wasn't the first member of the McKinnon family introduced anyway, and he also wasn't the first one to interact with the Love family. M.J. came first, and she was still in Bay City with an active storyline when Reginald and Mary appeared. Before Jake, M.J.'s teenage brother Ben dated Marley and Donna disapproved, in a mostly general class snobbery way. But since neither family was meant to be new to Bay City there was nothing in the storyline about being surprised the people existed. Reading the AWHP synopses I see that when Ben met Marley at first he let her think he was wealthy. Since they hadn't grown up together and Marley must have been too young to be aware of Mary and Reginald, there is no reason why she should have known anything about the McKinnons. The fact that Jake and Victoria grew up together in Pennsylvania is more peculiar.