<p>My daughters are all “namesakes”, but their names have been altered with an “A” on the end. The first one was named for her dad and middle name for a favorite cousin, the second for her paternal grandmother, middle name is a family surname and often used middle name, and the third was for me, her grandmother, and her great-great grandmother, middle name something that I liked that flowed with her first name. </p>
<p>They all have names that I considered “uncommon” but not weird. Actually, my oldest’s name turned out to be an EXTREMELY common name. People started using it all the time with various spellings. Their names suggest femininity and are kind of flowery and beautiful, I think…elegant.</p>
<p>The middle kid has all kinds of problems with people mispelling her name or mispronouncing it. which is amazing to me, because it’s not difficult, long or complicated. The youngest has an “old” name, beautiful one, but rarely used anymore.</p>
<p>My son first name is a family name, well represented on both sides of the family, with his father’s first name for his middle name. My daughter was given a name I chose when I was in my late teens, I met a girl with the name and just fell in love with it. The name is also a derivative of my middle name and speaks to her Italian heritage. Her middle name is a my father’s middle name, an old family surname, although I did change the spelling to the feminine form. And my kids have the same initials, which has its good points and bad points, lol!</p>
<p>I wanted names that appear on bike tags or balloons; no fancy spellings. Jeffrey, not Geoffrey, for example.</p>
<p>That list of hated names? I know Makayla, Dakota, madison, Taylor. I suspect Ella close second, though Lela seems out of style. Too many Isabella’s to mention in my area.</p>
<p>I like Biblical names. Micah as well as Michael. Rose and Grace are pretty. One of the chefs on Top Chef named his daughters Saffron and Sage.</p>
<p>If I had had a girl, I would have named her Jenna. I wasn’t a big “Dallas” fan but I remember being at a boyfriend’s home and his mom had the show on. Priscilla Presley’s character’s name was Jenna. Once I heard it I told myself that if I ever had a D that would be her name. But, no D. lol</p>
<p>I did once meet a Jenna who told me her mom named her after the same Dallas character. :)</p>
<p>In college, I was fascinated by Dylan Thomas. His wife was Caitlin. It was the early 70’s and I had never heard that name before. I thought it was lovely and I thought I would stash it away and name a baby Caitlin and it would be very unique. Ha! By the time I had a baby, I didn’t consider it.</p>
<p>“We even have kids in school who have parents who made up their LAST names, too.”</p>
<p>You do realize that ALL last names were made up at one point, right? </p>
<p>My family last name is the Polish equivalent of a common English name. Roughly translated it means ____son, which makes sense since some early last names were so-and-so’s son. We saw it at Jamestown, VA on a list of Polish workers that came over to work for the colonists, but with a different spelling. I’ve seen it spelled a few other ways-like ALL last names, and first names too-someone, somewhere, sometime MADE THEM UP. So I don’t get bothered by made up names, differently spelled names, etc. </p>
<p>This will really blow your mind-my ex and I gave our S ex’s last name without thinking, since that’s what people always do. But we felt that was like erasing MY last name (which I’d kept) so we gave our D that. And my youngest has HER dad’s last name. When my ex and I researched the legality of last names, we found that in that state it was perfectly legal to give your kids entirely different last names from that of either parent, and yes, make it up. We considered that, but decided our own last names are unusual enough that we wanted to continue them through our kids.</p>
<p>We just picked names we liked for our kids. Our last name is one syllable and we decided they needed 2 syllable first names to balance out the shorter last name. The first name we gave D turned out to be very popular (although we didn’t know of any others with that name at the time). Her middle name is very traditional. She got tired of being one of several with the same common first name through elementary school. By middle school, she decided to go by her middle name. </p>
<p>As for those fancy southern girl names - they’re not just limited to the south. I’m here in the northeast and we have plenty of girls with names like that. Many boys here also have last names for first names. I always refer to names like that as “law firm names.”</p>
<p>As for made-up names: I work in a school. The parents with creative name-giving always get very short with me when I ask them to repeat and spell the unusual names. </p>
<p>Siobhan…love that name. I’ve known several Siobhans and I’ve always known how to spell and pronounce it.</p>
<p>We wanted to follow Jewish tradition of naming for a deceased relative, but we were relatively open to basing the name on a shared initial rather than using the specific name, at least for the first name. All of our kids’ first names follow that rule, but they are stretching the limit - e.g. “Alex” is not named for Uncle Alexander but actually Grandpa Harold, which we pronounced with a cockney accent and dropped the “H.” (Definitely not orthodox!)</p>
<p>Their middle names, otoh, are tres traditional and range from yiddish to hebrew to anglicizations (and the namesake would have approved of that!). The two kids with the really weird middle names have, not surprisingly, chosen to drop them from use on official documents.</p>
<p>Both of our S’s have family names. Their first names are also Biblical names. Their middle names are after their grandfathers. Both S’s go by shortened versions of there given names. S1’s is not heard very often. S2’s turned out to be somewhat popular in his age group.</p>
<p>I work at a preschool/daycare center. It’s pretty interesting to watch the popular names come and go. There are tooo many little boys named “Jack” right now.</p>
<p>When my boys were in school, it wasn’t unusual to have 4-5 Tylers in each class. It’s funny how names go in cycles. When I was in school, I often had 4-5 Cathys in each class.</p>
<p>We also used the ‘female’ family last names as either a first name (girl) or middle names (for the boys) and everyone knows i didn’t have a girl and I’m not from the south. I knew quite a few people growing up who had their mother’s maiden name for a first name, though. For the boys, I made a list and my H made a list and without fail there was a common name on the list because we had some of the same names in our family tree. None of my boys have what I would call trendy names but they are also not terribly common. So all the middle names have some family connection but no juniors or trips for us.</p>
<p>My ex and I considered following that tradition by naming our son (since we knew he was going to be a boy) after a deceased male ancestor, but we didn’t really love any of the possibilities – Israel, Ernst, Adolf, Julius (originally Yehudah), Jacob (originally Jankiel), Moses, Nissan (Nathan), Morris (originally Moische or Moses), Shmuel, and Shlomo. But we did end up giving him a name that begins with “J,” and his Hebrew name is one of the names I mentioned. Had he been a girl, his middle name would have been Marianne, my mother’s name, so we gave him an “M” name – which he doesn’t particularly like, never uses, and will probably change someday to a different “M” name. </p>
<p>He’s always been happy with his first name, though, and that’s the important thing. For all the thought that parents give their choices, their kids always have the right to change their names if they don’t like them, as at least a couple of people I’ve known have done. So did I, for that matter, although it wasn’t because I thought there was anything particularly wrong with my original first name as such. My middle name is my mother’s family name, which is extremely unusual – there were only two families bearing that name in Europe going back to 1816 when one of my great-great-great-grandfathers first made it up, and I am now the only person still alive anywhere in the world who has that name (although it’s one of the names my son is considering if he ever does decide to change his middle name). I’m happy now that I have it, but when I was a child I always felt excruciatingly embarrassed when people asked me my middle name, because it was not only very strange and “foreign-sounding” to other people, but difficult to spell.</p>
<p>Is it hard for anyone else to fathom that we have moved from picking out baby names to colleges in the blink of an eye? (Ok I am glossing over sleepless nights and teenage 'tudes, but still!)</p>
<p>If you have more than one, I think it’s nice to consider how they go together.<br>
If you have a son with a very masculine name (like John or William or Samuel ) don’t give the next son a gender-neutral name like Jordan. Max and Whitney sound like brother and sister, not brothers. Likewise Angelique and Lane don’t sound like sisters.
If you have two “crowned heads of Europe” children ( like Edward and Elizabeth) don’t name the third one MaKenzie.
If you have named one after every relative possible, dont name the next one something random but popular. (I have a friend with older sister Elizabeth Anne, after both grandmothers. She is Linda Sue, just because it sounded good in the 50s)</p>
<p>Looked in books and picked names we liked. But S is a name in a Grateful Dead song. H was a deadhead and I, too, liked them.</p>
<p>Middle names are family names.</p>
<p>When a nurse asked the name of D1 while I was in the hospital, she told us that it was a name on a daytime soap. My H and I had no idea. Sure enough, it was a popular name in the late 80s and early 90s. And we had never known anyone with that name before.</p>
<p>Decided to go with a more traditional or old fashioned name with D2 since D1 name ended up so trendy. But D2’s sounds like a few other names, so everyone gets it wrong. (Think Jean vs Jane or Harold vs Howard, etc.)</p>
<p>we avoided names that would change to a nick names. I reaklly don’t understand nick names. Why name a kid John, then call him Jack? If you want him to be called Jack, then name him Jack…lol</p>
<p>We knew we wanted ds’s middle name to be his father’s first name, Jack, but we couldn’t come up with a first name to go with it. We started to get quite creative with the possibilities. Black, Apple, Cracker and Flap were all options. In the end, we were kind and went with a very traditional first name, so I don’t have an Apple Jack! </p>
<p>When I was pregnant with dd, dh wanted a first name that I thought was too trendy. He got two year old ds on his side and ds would say “How bout trendy name” endlessly. He was quite into animal videos at the time and when he started suggesting “How bout Meerkat” he lost his vote. He also suggested “Short” as a good first name. DD ended up with traditional name. DD is quite glad she is not named trendy name, Meerkat or Short. </p>
<p>I found that the best time to get dh to agree to any name you want is to discuss it during labor! “Sure honey, anything you want!”</p>
<p>Geeps20- I wanted my kids to get nicknames as I never had one! Think of a name like Mary, nothing else you could do with it. My kids have traditional names that aren’t extremely popular and have a nickname derived from their first name (eg. Catherine-Cathy). I wanted them to have a formal name but also a fun name. Youngest dd’s middle name came from her great grandfather only feminized. Eldest dd’s middle name we just liked and it works great with her first and last name.</p>
<p>My parents argued over my name. Mom wanted my middle name to be my first name and she lost. I often wonder if my life would have been the same with the other name.</p>
<p>I always thought that my mom’s first name was weird but now I really like it- Cleo.</p>
<p>pacnw,
My middle kid was in kindergarten when I was expecting #3. We still have her list of suggested names…Barbie, Clifford, Kirk, Spock, Matilda, Amelia Bedelia… Fortunately she didn’t get the final vote!</p>
<p>I also admit to disliking trendy names/“creative” spellings. (I read that these, plus naming kids all with the same initial correlate with low intelligence of the parents. ) I do like classic/Bible names, and also wanted names that could be taken seriously in any profession. “Dr. Catherine Anne Smith,” not “Dr. Tiffanee M’Kinzee Smith” etc. I picked the names, and H always agreed. Names were always decided before the birth, and I knew the gender of all but S2 before birth.</p>
<p>We’re Catholic, so we use saints names. And we have a lot of kids. S1 is a III, named after H and his father. H grew up using his middle name. I call him by his first name. S uses middle name. It turned out that I didn’t much like my f-i-l, so might not have used that name if I’d known the old man better at the time. (Name was not common in H’s and grandpa’s day, but sort of popular when S was born. ) D1 was named after H’s grandmother. But we picked a nickname that she has always been called from a children’s song. (Parents might know it–part of the lyrics: “Move over and make room for XXXXX”) It is a gender-neutral nickname, but much more commonly male. And she uses the “male” spelling. Some confusion, but people do remember her for it. However, her legal name is a traditional “queen” or “princess”/old lady name. Her middle name is my first name, and a together they make a nice “nun’s name.”
S2 A solid, old-fashioned, manly name we liked. (This name was more common in the older generation, so if H’s name and S2’s name appear together as father and son, people always think S is the dad and H is the son.) S3 was supposed to be named Patrick, but 2 acquaintances/neighbors had little Patricks right before S3 was born, so I felt pressured to come up with something else at the last minute. I happened to see the movie The Santa Clause then. There is a cute little boy character in that movie–so I named my S after him! It took me 15 years to admit this to my kids. If anyone knows Pope JP II’s given name, the American version is S3’s first/middle name. So I could say I named him after the Pope, not the kid in the movie. D2 is named after my maternal grandmother and has my middle name, which is also my mom’s first name. Also, a very classic nun’s name. D3 and D4 have old testament names, which are more often Jewish names. D3 has the uncommon middle name “Constance”–H just liked the name and I refused to use it for a first name. Her first name is common in MY ethnic group, short and easy to spell. (Unfortunately it sounds similar to a currently trendy name, and is often mispronounced.) D4’s old testament name is also often mispronounced. It has a lot of vowels and for some reason people scramble them up, and there are different pronunciations of this name in different ethnic groups. Her middle name is Jeanne. I just liked how this name sounded with our last name. She also has a second middle name, a very long Hawaiian name. We lived in Hawaii when I was pregnant, and I was always amused by the Hawaiian names in the birth announcements, so I wanted D4 to have one. I’m happy with all these names and wouldn’t change them–though a few people tried to talk me out of D3/D4’s names since they didn’t fit in with the others which are classic, traditional English names. S4 I was going to name Simon, but changed my mind at the last minute to the 2 saints’ names whose feasts are near his birthday. We always refer to him by first/middle name together.</p>