I had a boss in my 20’s I think of often. She had two sons, the way I do, and her boy-mom-hood made her talk as if she’d never met a single girl in her whole life (“I don’t know about [dismissive hand wave] girl stuff.")
The sons were named Grant and Kent, which I found amusing. To me, that is essentially the same name. Hard consonant opener. One syllable. Ends in “-nt.” with another hard stop.
What a choice! How can you have a whole extra opportunity to name a fresh human, and you don’t use that second chance to explore a new world of sound and meaning?
Cut to me: my kids are named Paul and James. They don’t make the same sound, but they’re still fairly similar names—one syllable, ends and begins in consonants, traditional, Anglicized Biblical, a # of letters you can count on one hand. I guess maybe we found a sound and vibe that worked for us, and we just stuck with it. Maybe we ran out of creative juice. Maybe my boss was onto something. (And does this mean I’m starting to not know about girl stuff??)
Is this a thing in your family? If you have more than one, did you accidentally or on purpose name your kids on a similar theme/vibe? Or do you have an Apple/Moses situation going on?
My name is Dixie and my sister's name is Daisy. Those are basically the same name - even people who don't know I have a sister, let alone what her name is, will call me Daisy by mistake. The wildest part is that it was not on purpose! My parent's "didn't think of it" ?!?! Also, just to be clear, we aren't puppies or dairy cows, but I can understand why you might think we are.
My husband and his sister are named Aaron and Abby (not Abigail), and their parents also claim that they "didn't think of it," "it" being using the first two names in the baby book and calling it a day.
One of my father's friends from a very old-school Brooklyn Italian family is named Paul John. His older brother is John Paul. Named, of course, after the Pope. We were having dinner with Paul John and their ancient mother, and someone asked her why she gave both her sons the same name. Her response: "don't be difficult."
We have the same theme here in my family--lots of Edward Johns and John Edwards. If I had had a third son he would have been named John for sure. But don't worry there is already a little Johnny and a little Eddie in my kids' generation running around so I didn't drop the name-tradition ball too bad.
Oh hi, it's me. I was on a FABULOUS epidural when my husband chose two names from our list of 5 for our identical twin girls. It took me 24 hours to realize they are basically the same name: Olive and Olympia. Alas, it is who they are now. My dad is also an identical twin and their names are Gordon and Grant, so maybe it is a family thing??
Identical twin girls here too! I was really set on the name Maya for a girl, so when we found out we were having two we ran through a bunch that we thought "matched" it. I was mad about it at the time but I'm really glad my husband talked me out of Maya and Kaia in my pregnancy haze. We settled on Maya and Lily which only kind of match but fit their personalities so it all worked out.
these are GREAT names! I mean yes they do both sort of start with the same letter sequence but in my mind they are also incredibly distinct vibe wise. But I love a good postpartum-delirum-naming-haze story. My friend Liz's mom got named "Judy" that way. She was supposed to be "Julie" but somebody fucked up while the mom was asleep and recovering.
Bless my parents Don and Donna for laying off the D names until kid number 4.
But my brother (of the non-D name) and his wife named their daughters Clara and Cora! And Clara was given the middle name Grace which was also the name of one of their dogs at the time.
Also, in an avalanche of coincidences, both my husband and I have younger brothers named Dan. So my 7yo has 2 uncles Dan and a grandpa Don, her other grandpa is Tom but so is my other brother (adding grandpa and uncle tom), then my two brothers married respectively a Kate and a Kayla. There is and has been confusion on names as she learned everyone’s names (and my family lives across the country and also pandemic childhood).
When she was born my mom was very worried at what she would call her grandparents so there wasn’t confusion! Lady that ship sailed before we ever had kids in the Dan, Dan, Donna, Don, Tom, Tom, Clara, Cora, Kate, Kayla of it all.
Again, I thank my parents so much. We had a family I grew up with that was Barb and Bill and 4 B names (Although technically the Bills were a william sr and william jr who were a Bill and a Billy)
I'm Andrea and my sister is Amanda so I swore never to do that to my own kids. I still answer to Amanda or Mandy as readily as my own name.
My twins are Una and Verity (Una born first of course) Their little brother is Paxton (Pax), my grandma's maiden name.
I tend to get very positive feedback on their names. Last year a fellow witch pointed out their names mean "One True Peace", which was totally unintended but a very nice result.
Do you pronounce Una "Yoona" or "Ooo-na"? I think both are beautiful! (I teach C16 literature, and there's an "Una" in the longest poem in English, Spenser's Faerie Queene. Americans almost all pronounce it "Ooo-na" but I think some Brits say "Yooona," pronouncing the name of the letter "U" for the first syllable.)
We say "Oona" and I'm glad we do because went they went to Kindergarten Verity (the other twin) immediately made a BF named Yuna! She even looks like them so it was def meant to be!
i will also say that i am a newborn hospitalist and so i see LOTS of names....just think a little bit is all i’m asking 😂😂. kid has to live with it forever....
like Barracuda....hope i’m not offending anyone but just NO....
My first is named May, and when we were thinking of names for our second girl we landed on Elaine. It was only after Elaine was born that I realized I named my children after comedy and screenwriting legend Elaine May, of whom I'm a big enough fan to have realized that earlier. I blame being pregnant.
My Mom is Sherry and her brother is Jerry (full names, not nicknames) . . . and their family dog was Jebby. I hear it was a bit confusing in their house when they were young.
My kids are Penn and Finn, so truly basically the same name, and we somehow did not think through that until after the little one had been named. I like both names separately, but it's very silly how hard it is to tell which kid we're talking about.
I was visiting my great-aunt last fall, and she told me her parents truly had run out of names -- she was the youngest of the six, and when she was born they were out of ideas and gave her my grandmother (her oldest sister's) middle name!
Mine are Theo and Grant. Every once in a while, a History-Minded Person will say, “how presidential!” I think at some point that maybe crossed my mind and then I forgot all about it as it was definitely not a conscious choice in theme naming. Luckily most people never really consider the past presidents so it doesn’t come up all that often!
Wow. I admire this commitment. But it also makes me slightly nervous (also a professor, somewhat wary of anything that brings my work more into my family life than it needs to be). But god bless us every one, honestly!
We named our boy Levin and then our #1 girl name turned out to be Elin (and to be real pains about it, it's not pronounced Ellen but Ee-lynn, we are monsters) and it's .... literally just taking out Levin's V and switching the placement of the L and E.
Sorry kids.
I was raised in a double consonant family (Kim and Katie) and didn't want to do that. But we definitely Same Named our kids anyway, just differently.
haha thank you, we love the pronunciation too! Everytime we're at an appointment they ask for Ellen so I guess I need to look on the bright side, she's definitely gonna learn early how to advocate for herself.
This is one of my FAVOURITE topics ever! I pride myself on being able to guess a sibling’s name (or at least ‘name vibe’) just by knowing the other person’s name and decade of birth*. When I get it wrong (and I sometimes do!) then I settle in because I know I’m in for an amazing story. Because when people don’t think in ‘sibset mindset’ they have a good reason for it and want to ‘show their working’ to you, which is usually fascinating.
My two kids are Winifred and Jeronimo which don’t seem at all alike in origin, but I guess both have same number of letters and agility ability (both can be shortened in various different ways) so do sort of obscurely match? We just had two different needs for each name; finding two names that ‘went together’ was the last thing on our mind, even though I felt societal pressure to do this, which is weird?!
I guess bundling things together helps to retain order, and if placing your kids in the same ‘naming zone’ helps keep the chaotic shitshow of parenthood at bay, that’s a good thing.
As an aside, I’m a Lorelei and if we had another daughter I was planning on calling her Lorelei too, Gilmore Girls style. (I wish I’d done this with my first now, because we are obviously definitely never having another kid.)
*My greatest sibset guessing moment was when a new kid called Leon started in my daughter’s class, and on the first guess I guessed that his brother’s name was Liam (because it seemed so BOLD to use them as a pair?!) and it was! 💅🏽
What an amazing superpower! This is not exactly related but my brother goes by Jack (he's a John) which was pretty rare in the early 1980's in the States. Now BOTH the names Claire and Jack seem hot here and I've met more than one sister/bro combo with the same names.
Sibset, I love it! I firmly believe the kids' names need to work together and I'm always amazed when they don't share the same vibe. Like Ryan Reynolds's 3 daughters: James, Inez, and Betty. What?! Haven't heard about the 4th kid yet; I'm waiting with bated breath.
My own three daughters are Spenser, Avrey, and Devyn, the latter being identical twins. I'd have named them Avrey and Quinn, but my husband felt like he'd already lost two of these battles so I threw him a bone 😂. My vibe is gender neutral/masculine leaning, last nameish. I like that Devyn and Avrey share 3 of 5 letters, including the unusual v. They don't sound alike but seem compatible and work with Spenser. I HATE twins named Sugar and Spice, Heaven and Nevaeh, Mitchell and Michelle, etc. I mean not the twins themselves, but their terrible names 🤣
You must know about the Baby Name Wizard, then? I LOVE the sibling name part of that site! (Apparently now it's the https://namerology.com/baby-name-grapher/). Too much historical name fun!
I do not! I know what I'm doing this weekend 😂. I've no need for baby names of any kind (aforementioned twins are almost 24), but it will be fun nonetheless!
My mom’s name is Agnes Rita, her mom’s name was Agnes Rita. My aunts name is Rita Agnes. My mom decided to end the “tradition” and found Vanessa that shared the “nes” from Agnes.
My dad is Hugh, and his dad was Hugh. The confusion could have ended there, but no - he married my mom, whose dad is ALSO named Hugh, and who ALSO decided to have a junior in my uncle. Four Hughs. In a very close-knit and also very small family.
So of course when I found out I was having a boy, everyone was like "Are you naming him Hugh?" I was like, no, but I did consider using it as a middle name/catchall honorarium. Then my father-in-law caught wind of this. He is Joe III, my BIL is Joe IV, my nephew Joe V. He assumed we were going to use Joseph/Joe, as though his other son perpetuating the dynasty was not enough.
And then it occurred to us - we can use neither of them! We can start fresh! We can break the cycle! And so we did. (My kid is Ned. Same vibe, single-syllable distinctive name as Hugh and Joe, but without the baggage.)
I should add that I am named after my great-grandmother, and have two cousins with the same name, which is pretty unusual and we are quite the party trick at family reunions. My great-grandfather also spawned about 10 namesakes across the three generations after him. It's a lot.
I’ve got a Daniel and a Nathan, but we only narrowly avoided unintentionally naming our kids Daniel and Nathaniel. Two syllable, Anglicized Biblical, but at least they don’t rhyme. We did intentionally give them Anglicized first names followed by very Hispanic multiple middle names, but that came from our last name being Hispanic and wanting to rep both sides of their heritage in the names they would hear most (first and last). It’s funny, I think of them as being such different names because one was a family name, and one came from favorite movie characters and actors-but they really are very similar.
I have a Thomas and a James - we used to get a lot of, “Like the trains?” (H’yuk yuk yuk.) Luckily, that’s stopped since they got older, but the names - trains aside - are definitely similar.
My brother and I both have an H in ours - Meghan and John - and our preschool could not wrap their heads around BOTH kids having optional Hs, and would drop it from one of ours every time (it changed which one).
My kid is at a Jewish camp this summer, and it is absolutely wild to see classically Jewish names like Rachel, Rebecca, Daniel, Jonathan all over the parent list and not on the kid list- which instead has like, Abraham and Moses. Those somehow feel edgy to me!
I never stop being fascinated by the names that were really in when we were growing up that are on pause right now--whither the Brians, Kevins and Justins?
Also the Jennifers and Michelles! I admit that I had an out-of proportion fear of naming my kids anything faddish that would allow people to date them to a particular moment. (I'm not really sure why this seemed like it would be an insuperable issue, but it took us a really long time to adopt, and all of my anxiety needed somewhere to go.) Reading this thread makes me wish I'd had this community of Witches to help me vet names—so many beautiful and creative solutions to various naming conundrums!
Growing up, I hated having a different name. And the Scooby-Doo references were tiring. I went through a phase where I only answered by the name Nancy — I think I wanted to be one of the Eight is Enough sisters. But I've grown to like my name. And recently I've heard it pop more, even some babies with it. My husband is a Brian and complains about his name. So I think I need to thank my mom.
My FIL’s name was Thomas and my husbands middle name is Thomas and his older brothers middle name is Thomas and his younger brother is named Thomas and has his grandfathers first name as his middle name 🙃
If we had a boy I really wanted to name him Avi and my husband would agree to it because if you combine Avi and his first name (Michael) first and middle name would translate to “my father who is like god” or something like that. (I still lament that a little, I love the combo Avi Michael the flow feels so good to my brain)
We all ended up being M names, it wasn’t on purpose. All our initials are the same! Even my daughters middle name is an M (named after my husband’s late sister).
We also have Thomases running through our family - it was my grandmother’s last name until she married, then my dad’s name, and my son and a cousin’s son are both Thomas!
Pretty sure OG Thomas was my FIL 😂 adored him but not surprised he’d want to do something like that! I think my younger BIL is technically supposed to be a jr but their middle names are *slightly* different.
Are they Greek?? That’s a very Greek thing. My dad’s entire generation has the same middle name (after grandpa) and then there’s a whole naming system - first son is paternal Grandpa name, Dad name; second son is maternal grandpa name, dad name…and then the next generation they switch - middle name is first name, first name is middle, over and over until everyone is a Nicholas. My maiden name is very uncommon and there are essentially 15 men with the same exact name.
I have a friend named Tommy, and every time he meets someone named Tommy, he asks who they are named after because Tommys are almost always named after someone. My son Tommy (age 11 tomorrow - eek) shares his name with my brother Tommy, my father Big Tom, my husband's grandfather Tom, my husband's uncle Tommy, and my husband's cousin Tommy (on the other side from the uncle and grandfather). Even though we have six Tom/Tommy's, my son is the only Tommy Donnelly so we rolled with it! His middle name is Paul, after my FIL.
My mother, the least creative woman on the planet, intentionally named us what she believed were flexible, common names-- Kathleen and Margaret. (Clearly she whiffed a bit.) Then she called us Katie and Peggy, which are more or less the same name. But she was not content with this. When considering middle names, she decided that I needed a short middle name, and being boring went with "Ann." Then she got to Peggy, figured a short middle name was also necessary, decided against Sue for obvious reasons, shrugged and picked "Ann" again. There was no reasoning behind "Ann" other than it was short and a name.
(This also subjected not just Peggy, but also me, to a childhood of explaining to people in our small non-Irish Catholic town that Peggy is a reasonably common nickname for Margaret.)
noooooo!!! Oh man she must have been so tired to just do "Ann" again. Did you/your sister get confirmed and did you go for juicy saint names to spice it up?
Our stupid CCD program *mandated* that you use your existing name if it was a saint. So we were stuck. (I tried to lobby that Kathleen and Catherine were different so I could go wild, but I was denied.)
See my comment above re: six people with the first name Tommy in our immediate circle of relatives and my eldest son being named for his two grandfathers...beyond that, my great-great grandmother was Agnes, my great-grandmother was Louise Agnes, my grandmother was Grayce Louise, my mother is Paula Grayce, I am Maeve Grayce, and my daughter is Maura Grayce. My grandmother's actual legal first name was Grace but when she was in college, all of her friends added a "y" to their names for fun and elegance, and hers stuck. Now it is a legacy. Everyone calls my daughter Maeve by accident; we didn't anticipate this, but I guess our names are similar enough and no one expects a young Maura or a middle-aged Maeve. Maura's first name came about by combining the names of her grandmothers (MAUReen and paulA). We also have Colin Cotter, whose middle name is also my husband's middle name and his mother's maiden name. When we called my parents to announce his birth and share his name, my dad thought we were saying "Connor Connor Donnelly" instead of "Colin Cotter Donnelly." He kept repeating that (with joy) very loudly on the phone, obviously not thinking reasonably about the fact that we would never give our child the same first AND middle name. Our kids' first initials are T, C, and M, which are the same first initials of me and my siblings (Maeve, Tommy, and Caitlin). Anyway, I think Tommy, Colin, and Maura hang well together as basic Irish-American sibling names.
We definitely do the honorary names in my family - my dad was Thomas, after his dad, and my maternal grandfather was also Thomas; it's a middle name for one of my nephews and if I'd had a second boy I would have named him Thomas. My grandmother and mother are Kathleen; that's my middle name and I gave it to my daughter, too. My mom and her sisters all have Mary or Marie as middle names - Catholics! As for theme: I gave my kids Irish first names - my husband got the last name, which is Russian, so they have pretty unique names.
My middle name is Anne and my brother’s was Anthony 🫣 Half the men on my dad’s side of the family are named John or Dave, and at a recent family reunion there was a photo of 4 or 5 Reeses (in that case a conscious choice to keep the name active in the family, which I think is pretty cool). We have a cousin Anthony on my dad’s side as well.
I’m Claire and my sibs are Luke Kate and Jeanne - always felt like Jeanne as the baby got the slightly more adventurous name. My mom wanted to name me Chloe but it was vetoed by my dad so instead she named me after her mom she didn’t get alone with? I don’t know.
I have the same middle name as my mom, which is also her sister’s first name. My sister gave her daughter our sister’s middle name. So middle names are a big shared thing on my side.
My girls are Penelope, who we’ve always called Poppy and Fallon so I feel like they’re very different. I chose the first and my spouse the latter. We’re from very different backgrounds so I feel like they give pretty different vibes. And Fallon’s middle name is Artemis, while Poppy’s is after my sister Kate.
There was a IV invited to our wedding and I forgot what # he is and called him a "III" on the invite and I think it was perceived as a bit of a dig. I'm sorry but I can't keep count at that point!
My kids are Avery and Emily (and both of their middle names are alliterative) and our last name ends with an "ee" sound. I'm Kristy. So many Ys, so many vowels.
I have a ton of John/Jons in my life. My dad, my husband, an uncle, a cousin, another cousins husband. So many that we had to start calling all of them by their full names haha.
I have two sons named Luke and Ben - my daughter bemoans that these are ‘basic’ names 😀 I liked that they were strong and simple and easy to spell (their surname is not …) So yes I guess we fall into the same name twice category - single syllable, Anglo, biblical names (Benjamin)
I also have a Luke! Our last name ends in "y" so I was hellbent on a full consonant stop first name and my husband vetoed Julian and Declan. My daughter is Harper for similar reasons and also because my husband vetoed Oona, Alice, Charlotte, and Julia. I'm still sad/mad about Oona.
Love all your girls pics …. My husband chose our daughter’s name and I gave her my mum’s first name as her middle - Margaret (a name I love and hope will make a comeback)
I named both of my kids vaguely European-sounding names with slightly distinct spellings. However, they both have "weird" middle names and I really wanted to name them Casimir and Fraxinus, but got overruled by my ex.
My twin boys' names are both pretty Irish, which I didn't do on purpose but they are family names and husband and I are both pretty Irish genetically, so it happened. My other choice on my husband's side was his Italian grandfather who was named Michael but...
My sister-in-law married a Mike (my brother), her dad was a Mike, her brother is a Mike (Jr) and her sister married a Mike. I wasn't about to bring another Mike into the mix.
Not to mention my husband's last name, Durr, makes any first name sound like you are saying "-ed her". So that ruled out Ben, Bill, and a host of others. My brother, the hilarious jokester, wanted me to name one of my kids "Fender Benjamin" so that his name could be Fender Bender.
I mentioned my twins' names below - Maya and Lily, and their brother is Wyatt, so more a vibe than a rule.
However, my high school friends had an all-time great name scheme: one was Thomas Olaf Meyer, and the other was James Isaac Meyer so their initials were T.O.M. and J.I.M., which were the nicknames they both went by. Unsurprisingly their dad is nerdy engineer-inventor type.
Dude, my family doesn't seem to have this, but the old neighbors, no joke, Dustin, Justin, and Rustin. I think Rustin eventually went by Steve or something.
My name is Kate and my brother's name is Nate. My parents gave us longer versions of those names and (still!) seem genuinely surprised that we wound up with rhyming nicknames, despite those being the most common variants of each. We grew up in an echoey house and whenever one of us got yelled for, both of us ignored it because you could never hear the first letter clearly and we both had plausible deniability.
My wife has a coworker who let his oldest son name their third child(!!) and he named the baby Jack. Oldest son's name is John. I know those are technically two different names, but still. I think the kid was 9 or 10 at the time.
Bless my mother who was probably just insane with 4 children and the oldest barely 7 when she decided the newborn must be named Dan NOT Daniel JUST Dan because if she named him Daniel, he might get called Danny which she actually didn’t mind, but if he was called Danny then his then 3yo older brother, a Thomas generally called Tom, might get called Tommy which she despised. Which, cows out of the barn lady!?! But also yes my mom has adhd why do you ask?
My grandfather, whose name was John, named my uncle John Christian, but whenever anyone called out “John,” it was hard to tell who they were talking about, so my mom called him Chris. Then John Christian had a son and named him Christian, and everyone called his son Chris, so his wife and other kids went back to calling John Christian “John,” in order to not mix him up with his son. But my mom and dad and sister and I still call him Chris, so it gets very confusing when the extended family gets together and we talk about “Chris” and “John” but that can mean three different people, or the same person.
this is so funny. I guess this is the upside to the olden days when people would give people nicknames that came out of the blue just to tell people apart. My MIL is named Barbara but goes by "Tudy" and my old bf's mom's name was Karen but went by "Susie."
I basically named our dog the same thing as our firstborn. The kid has two extra consonants, but it is noticeably similar... to everyone except me, apparently! I didn't realize it until about six months after I named him.
The kids share a long O sound, and I notice that a lot in sibling names, that affinity for a particular vowel (presumably in the context of the last name.
Ha! When I was a kid, my dad often couldn't immediately spit out the proper name for the kid whose attention he wanted, so he would cycle through the three kids' names and the dog's name and just assume he had it covered. Then at some point, he settled on "Fred"—which was no one's name—as an all-purpose "hey you."
One of the kids has name very similar to the cat. Fully did not realise until the kid was 6+ months. Only possible defence is they don't look the same written down...?!
I have two boys named Sam and Gus - both one syllable and sort of old fashioned/old man names. Also, my husband goes by his middle name, which is something that I always swore I would never do before I had kids. It just seemed unnecessarily complicated to me. Why not just name the kid what you actually want to call him? Then I did something even worse to my kid. Gus's legal name is John August. I wanted to name him after my grandfather John, but August John didn't sound right to me. I also didn't want to add another John to the family because I already have two uncles named John and brother named Jonathan who goes by Jon. Plus, personality-wise he's just such a Gus. So now he goes by a nickname based on his middle name. Sorry dude. You're going to be explaining that one forever. That is still not as weird as what my paternal grandparents did with their kids' names. My dad is one of five who all have D names - Dan, Donna, Doug, Dennis, and Dennis. That's right - two kids named Dennis. My dad had an older brother who died as an infant who was named Dennis George. When my dad was born a few years later, they named him Dennis George II! I cannot fathom why they would do that.
My grandmother had two sisters named Mary. The first had her middle name bestowed by my great-grandmother's SILs, and she always went by that (there were like 10 SILs, so they held a lot of sway). With the 4th girl, my great-grandmother tried again - but this Mary was always called May.
We went with 'old fashioned' family names. Our oldest is Margaret Louise -- named after my husband's great-grandmother. Our son is Henry Edward. There are Edwards on both sides of the family, and I just always knew that if we had a son I wanted to name him Henry and call him Hank. My FILs middle name was H -- just the letter, no name -- so I maintain that they probably wanted him to be William Henry and whoever did the birth certificate just whiffed and made him officially Billie H.
I really wanted to make Hank's middle name Kermit, 100% after the frog. I called him Kermit when he was still in the womb. But, my husband vetoed it.
I went to high school with a family of five sons and I’m still acquainted with one of them 25 years later. Every one of them had the same first name; to keep them straight, they were referred to as One, Two, Three, Four, and Five. (I wish I could reveal it here, as it’s a beautiful and somewhat unusual name, but I want to respect their privacy so I won’t.)
My name is Carolyn which seems like no big deal, except for all of my 44 years on earth most people, other than family and close friends, call me Caroline. Even when I spell it out letter by letter, people write Caroline. Even when they ask, is it Carolyn or Caroline and I say ‘Carolyn’, they say great, I love the name Caroline. I’ve only known one Caroline in my life and she said people would always call her Carolyn. Must be a glitch in the matrix, that’s the only thing that makes any sense
My son is Isaac and daughter Natalie because we wanted names that translate in Russian (hubs is Russian). My daughter is named after my grandma Nettie, too.
My oldest is Margaret and my younger is Elizabeth and because I'm a British historian my history friends assume we named them after the royal family but in the wrong order. But no, Margaret is named after my grandmother and we both liked Elizabeth. Margaret's middle name, Elise, was chose by her paternal grandma and Elizabeth's is Kathleen after her maternal grandma.
My mother's father was Delbert and he had 2 brothers, Eberhard and Dana, all given names my great-grandparents thought no one could create a nickname for because they hated nicknames (why??). But Delbert was always called Mike as his last name was Myrick, so that was a failure.
We have "Little Laura", "Grandma Laura" (whose given name is actually Rose?), "Actual Laura" (as opposed to Laura-But-Really-Rose-Laura), and "Regular Laura" (who didn't want to be called "Big Laura" or "Older Laura," so... all anyone else could come up with was apparently "regular.") I can't.
I'm loving these name stories! In my extended family on my mom's side, for awhile we had a Connie, Bonnie and Ronnie. In my generation on that same side, we have a Kelti, Kelsey, Kasey, Carly, and Kate. Bless my late grandmother (Connie) ... she used to call both me (Kelsey) and my cousin (Kelti) her own blended combination that sounded something like "Keltzy." We're less than a year apart so we were always together anyway, and I thought it was an adorable shared nickname.
My husband’s sister is named Katharine but goes my Katie. My name is Katherine (goes by Katherine or Kat) and his brother married a Katherine (goes by Kate). So both brothers married a woman with their sister’s name
My kids are Max, Lucy, Scarlett, and Finn. The only pattern I really see is that Max and Lucy both have their own Beatles songs. (His full name is Maxwell and they have a song called Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, which is actually a creepy song.) I am a big Beatles fan, but I did not do this on purpose. In fact, we almost went with Sadie for Scarlett, partly because it also has a Beatles song. But she was a Scarlett. Max and Scarlett do have a similar sound to them perhaps. Finn’s full name is Finneus. I wish we had gone with an as at the end, because it looks prettier and no one seems able to pronounce it with this spelling.
As for confusing names, my mother, brother, grandfather, uncle, two aunts, and two cousins all went by their middle names. Also, my grandfather Tom (the one who went by his middle name) has several namesakes. My nephew Thomas and his own son Tom. And my husband has an Uncle Tom.
Plus, there are two Madisons and two Saras (including myself). Six of my aunts have Mary as their first name. (Roman Catholic.) And the icing on the cake - my older brother and my stepdad are both named Jerry. We tried calling them Jerry 1 and Jerry 2, but realized most of us were calling the older Jerry Jerry 1, because he was older, while my mother insisted on calling my brother Jerry 1, because he was in her life first. We abandoned all that and just use last names and initials when we aren’t speaking to them directly.
My boys’ names are very different (Hilliard and Solomon) but they go by the nicknames of Hill and Sol, which have a lot of similarity in length and sound!
The main takeaway might be: parenthood and pregnancy are exhausting, and no matter how much time is spent on name selection…it IS really possible not to make alllllll the realizations. 😂
For myself, I had what I thought were hard naming rules and I abandoned almost all of them for names I just liked the best!
1) As a Gretchen with a little sister named Emily…it was VERY important that my kids’ names were around the same popularity. Of course now getting personalized anything is super easy…but I bore the scars of the 70s and 80s LOL.
2) I wanted names with nickname options, because…SEE ABOVE.
3) I didn’t want to repeat initials.
Everything else went out the window! I didn’t want a name with a “th” sound because that’s how our last name ends. Oops - 1st kid’s name starts with Th! Nickname I loved best for kid #2 is a little choppy with our last name - don’t care! Kid #3’s nickname is a bit of a stretch and I rarely use it bc I like her given name more - literally a non issue in real life!
I would say my kids’ names have the same vintage/grandparent style, but they don’t rhyme or get mixed up.
oh i love this discussion! our last name is Stepaniak which is a mouthful. i get called Stephanie ALL the time which never happened when my last name was Burke. and P.S. is not my name.
we named all our kids kind of two syllable, simple names bc the last one is such a mouthful. my husband wanted Benjamin for the first and i was like that is just too much. we also tried for Marcus Jr but it was just too weird
their names are Jakob Kai, Oskar Liam, Kaleb Danek and Sophia Rose. so yeah, we have a K thing going...that was not my original spelling for Jakob but my friend misspelled it and i was like that is genius! goes with the last name! so we ran with that for three boys. Sophia was my pick when we first got pregnant and i have loved the name ever since so when she was a girl, that was just it.
i definitely found naming the boys harder -not just for the K thing....but the list of girls names i likes was pages long...
and i pretty much just ran right over my husband bc he started saying things with number 2 and 3 like Zeus and Theophillis which are fine, but we are not Greek, and just no. he wanted Tigerlilly for the girl and i was like we are not Native American either...🤦♀️. so he was cut off from naming privileges 😂😂
ha!! I really liked the name "India" for a girl in theory but we are not Indian nor have ever been to India and I was like that may be a tough sell. Anyway no girls came and there are like 4 boys names to choose from so here we are in basicville.
My name is Dixie and my sister's name is Daisy. Those are basically the same name - even people who don't know I have a sister, let alone what her name is, will call me Daisy by mistake. The wildest part is that it was not on purpose! My parent's "didn't think of it" ?!?! Also, just to be clear, we aren't puppies or dairy cows, but I can understand why you might think we are.
I love both those names! But yes I'm shocked you're not twins.
Thanks! Yes - I mean, I love both names and mine a bit more - but ridiculous.
My husband and his sister are named Aaron and Abby (not Abigail), and their parents also claim that they "didn't think of it," "it" being using the first two names in the baby book and calling it a day.
One of my father's friends from a very old-school Brooklyn Italian family is named Paul John. His older brother is John Paul. Named, of course, after the Pope. We were having dinner with Paul John and their ancient mother, and someone asked her why she gave both her sons the same name. Her response: "don't be difficult."
lol this made me laugh so hard.
We have the same theme here in my family--lots of Edward Johns and John Edwards. If I had had a third son he would have been named John for sure. But don't worry there is already a little Johnny and a little Eddie in my kids' generation running around so I didn't drop the name-tradition ball too bad.
Oh hi, it's me. I was on a FABULOUS epidural when my husband chose two names from our list of 5 for our identical twin girls. It took me 24 hours to realize they are basically the same name: Olive and Olympia. Alas, it is who they are now. My dad is also an identical twin and their names are Gordon and Grant, so maybe it is a family thing??
Identical twin girls here too! I was really set on the name Maya for a girl, so when we found out we were having two we ran through a bunch that we thought "matched" it. I was mad about it at the time but I'm really glad my husband talked me out of Maya and Kaia in my pregnancy haze. We settled on Maya and Lily which only kind of match but fit their personalities so it all worked out.
What a beautiful pairing, Maya and Lily! They're symmetrical in a way but different. At least you were cognizant enough not to spell it "Kaya." ;)
these are GREAT names! I mean yes they do both sort of start with the same letter sequence but in my mind they are also incredibly distinct vibe wise. But I love a good postpartum-delirum-naming-haze story. My friend Liz's mom got named "Judy" that way. She was supposed to be "Julie" but somebody fucked up while the mom was asleep and recovering.
I once taught twins names Seth and Sam and the mom had the exact same story as me! It's a lovely fog one is in when on an epidural.
Have you watched the Canadian kids show the Odd Squad? Olive and Olympia are two of the main characters (all of the kids have O names)
Yes! It came out after my kids were born which made me feel a bit better about it.
Bless my parents Don and Donna for laying off the D names until kid number 4.
But my brother (of the non-D name) and his wife named their daughters Clara and Cora! And Clara was given the middle name Grace which was also the name of one of their dogs at the time.
Also, in an avalanche of coincidences, both my husband and I have younger brothers named Dan. So my 7yo has 2 uncles Dan and a grandpa Don, her other grandpa is Tom but so is my other brother (adding grandpa and uncle tom), then my two brothers married respectively a Kate and a Kayla. There is and has been confusion on names as she learned everyone’s names (and my family lives across the country and also pandemic childhood).
When she was born my mom was very worried at what she would call her grandparents so there wasn’t confusion! Lady that ship sailed before we ever had kids in the Dan, Dan, Donna, Don, Tom, Tom, Clara, Cora, Kate, Kayla of it all.
My parents have V good married friends named Don and Donna! And
I know a young couple: Aleksandra and Alexander. Both go by Alex (Aleks).
I knew a family with a Don, Donna, and three kids all with "D" names!
Again, I thank my parents so much. We had a family I grew up with that was Barb and Bill and 4 B names (Although technically the Bills were a william sr and william jr who were a Bill and a Billy)
I'm Andrea and my sister is Amanda so I swore never to do that to my own kids. I still answer to Amanda or Mandy as readily as my own name.
My twins are Una and Verity (Una born first of course) Their little brother is Paxton (Pax), my grandma's maiden name.
I tend to get very positive feedback on their names. Last year a fellow witch pointed out their names mean "One True Peace", which was totally unintended but a very nice result.
Oooooh these are great names. You did good.
Do you pronounce Una "Yoona" or "Ooo-na"? I think both are beautiful! (I teach C16 literature, and there's an "Una" in the longest poem in English, Spenser's Faerie Queene. Americans almost all pronounce it "Ooo-na" but I think some Brits say "Yooona," pronouncing the name of the letter "U" for the first syllable.)
We say "Oona" and I'm glad we do because went they went to Kindergarten Verity (the other twin) immediately made a BF named Yuna! She even looks like them so it was def meant to be!
i will also say that i am a newborn hospitalist and so i see LOTS of names....just think a little bit is all i’m asking 😂😂. kid has to live with it forever....
like Barracuda....hope i’m not offending anyone but just NO....
Oh NOES.
My first is named May, and when we were thinking of names for our second girl we landed on Elaine. It was only after Elaine was born that I realized I named my children after comedy and screenwriting legend Elaine May, of whom I'm a big enough fan to have realized that earlier. I blame being pregnant.
you could do a lot worse!! Better than Mike and Nick anyway.
There's also a well-known US historian named Elaine May, so it's clearly popular!
Those are both beautiful names! And I think the connection to the OG Elaine May is just a bonus.
My Mom is Sherry and her brother is Jerry (full names, not nicknames) . . . and their family dog was Jebby. I hear it was a bit confusing in their house when they were young.
My kids are Penn and Finn, so truly basically the same name, and we somehow did not think through that until after the little one had been named. I like both names separately, but it's very silly how hard it is to tell which kid we're talking about.
I was visiting my great-aunt last fall, and she told me her parents truly had run out of names -- she was the youngest of the six, and when she was born they were out of ideas and gave her my grandmother (her oldest sister's) middle name!
Mine are Theo and Grant. Every once in a while, a History-Minded Person will say, “how presidential!” I think at some point that maybe crossed my mind and then I forgot all about it as it was definitely not a conscious choice in theme naming. Luckily most people never really consider the past presidents so it doesn’t come up all that often!
I had a history professor in college whose kids were Theodore and Eleanor, and their dog was Franklin.
Wow. I admire this commitment. But it also makes me slightly nervous (also a professor, somewhat wary of anything that brings my work more into my family life than it needs to be). But god bless us every one, honestly!
The best is he wasn’t even a US history prof! Just a Roosevelt fan.
We have neighbors whose kids are Theo and Grant - you're not alone! :)
We named our boy Levin and then our #1 girl name turned out to be Elin (and to be real pains about it, it's not pronounced Ellen but Ee-lynn, we are monsters) and it's .... literally just taking out Levin's V and switching the placement of the L and E.
Sorry kids.
I was raised in a double consonant family (Kim and Katie) and didn't want to do that. But we definitely Same Named our kids anyway, just differently.
I love Elin Ee-lynn and I don't think you're monsters at all! I mean, maybe you are, who am I to say, but not because of that. ;)
haha thank you, we love the pronunciation too! Everytime we're at an appointment they ask for Ellen so I guess I need to look on the bright side, she's definitely gonna learn early how to advocate for herself.
I’m Annette and my sister is Janette. We always got asked if we were twins.
WOW! If only there was a third, there'd be a Nanette.
No, No Nanette.
(…I’ll show myself out.)
This is one of my FAVOURITE topics ever! I pride myself on being able to guess a sibling’s name (or at least ‘name vibe’) just by knowing the other person’s name and decade of birth*. When I get it wrong (and I sometimes do!) then I settle in because I know I’m in for an amazing story. Because when people don’t think in ‘sibset mindset’ they have a good reason for it and want to ‘show their working’ to you, which is usually fascinating.
My two kids are Winifred and Jeronimo which don’t seem at all alike in origin, but I guess both have same number of letters and agility ability (both can be shortened in various different ways) so do sort of obscurely match? We just had two different needs for each name; finding two names that ‘went together’ was the last thing on our mind, even though I felt societal pressure to do this, which is weird?!
I guess bundling things together helps to retain order, and if placing your kids in the same ‘naming zone’ helps keep the chaotic shitshow of parenthood at bay, that’s a good thing.
As an aside, I’m a Lorelei and if we had another daughter I was planning on calling her Lorelei too, Gilmore Girls style. (I wish I’d done this with my first now, because we are obviously definitely never having another kid.)
*My greatest sibset guessing moment was when a new kid called Leon started in my daughter’s class, and on the first guess I guessed that his brother’s name was Liam (because it seemed so BOLD to use them as a pair?!) and it was! 💅🏽
This is amazing!!! I also love this topic the most!!
What an amazing superpower! This is not exactly related but my brother goes by Jack (he's a John) which was pretty rare in the early 1980's in the States. Now BOTH the names Claire and Jack seem hot here and I've met more than one sister/bro combo with the same names.
Sibset, I love it! I firmly believe the kids' names need to work together and I'm always amazed when they don't share the same vibe. Like Ryan Reynolds's 3 daughters: James, Inez, and Betty. What?! Haven't heard about the 4th kid yet; I'm waiting with bated breath.
My own three daughters are Spenser, Avrey, and Devyn, the latter being identical twins. I'd have named them Avrey and Quinn, but my husband felt like he'd already lost two of these battles so I threw him a bone 😂. My vibe is gender neutral/masculine leaning, last nameish. I like that Devyn and Avrey share 3 of 5 letters, including the unusual v. They don't sound alike but seem compatible and work with Spenser. I HATE twins named Sugar and Spice, Heaven and Nevaeh, Mitchell and Michelle, etc. I mean not the twins themselves, but their terrible names 🤣
You must know about the Baby Name Wizard, then? I LOVE the sibling name part of that site! (Apparently now it's the https://namerology.com/baby-name-grapher/). Too much historical name fun!
I do not! I know what I'm doing this weekend 😂. I've no need for baby names of any kind (aforementioned twins are almost 24), but it will be fun nonetheless!
Too fun! Be careful out there! It has taken waaaay too much of my time over the past 20 years!
My mom’s name is Agnes Rita, her mom’s name was Agnes Rita. My aunts name is Rita Agnes. My mom decided to end the “tradition” and found Vanessa that shared the “nes” from Agnes.
My dad is Hugh, and his dad was Hugh. The confusion could have ended there, but no - he married my mom, whose dad is ALSO named Hugh, and who ALSO decided to have a junior in my uncle. Four Hughs. In a very close-knit and also very small family.
So of course when I found out I was having a boy, everyone was like "Are you naming him Hugh?" I was like, no, but I did consider using it as a middle name/catchall honorarium. Then my father-in-law caught wind of this. He is Joe III, my BIL is Joe IV, my nephew Joe V. He assumed we were going to use Joseph/Joe, as though his other son perpetuating the dynasty was not enough.
And then it occurred to us - we can use neither of them! We can start fresh! We can break the cycle! And so we did. (My kid is Ned. Same vibe, single-syllable distinctive name as Hugh and Joe, but without the baggage.)
I should add that I am named after my great-grandmother, and have two cousins with the same name, which is pretty unusual and we are quite the party trick at family reunions. My great-grandfather also spawned about 10 namesakes across the three generations after him. It's a lot.
Same! My dad, both grandfathers and my uncle are all Frank. It's why my brother's name is not also Frank.
I’ve got a Daniel and a Nathan, but we only narrowly avoided unintentionally naming our kids Daniel and Nathaniel. Two syllable, Anglicized Biblical, but at least they don’t rhyme. We did intentionally give them Anglicized first names followed by very Hispanic multiple middle names, but that came from our last name being Hispanic and wanting to rep both sides of their heritage in the names they would hear most (first and last). It’s funny, I think of them as being such different names because one was a family name, and one came from favorite movie characters and actors-but they really are very similar.
I also have a Daniel! Nathan was on our short list, too.
I have a Thomas and a James - we used to get a lot of, “Like the trains?” (H’yuk yuk yuk.) Luckily, that’s stopped since they got older, but the names - trains aside - are definitely similar.
My brother and I both have an H in ours - Meghan and John - and our preschool could not wrap their heads around BOTH kids having optional Hs, and would drop it from one of ours every time (it changed which one).
My kid is at a Jewish camp this summer, and it is absolutely wild to see classically Jewish names like Rachel, Rebecca, Daniel, Jonathan all over the parent list and not on the kid list- which instead has like, Abraham and Moses. Those somehow feel edgy to me!
I never stop being fascinated by the names that were really in when we were growing up that are on pause right now--whither the Brians, Kevins and Justins?
Also the Jennifers and Michelles! I admit that I had an out-of proportion fear of naming my kids anything faddish that would allow people to date them to a particular moment. (I'm not really sure why this seemed like it would be an insuperable issue, but it took us a really long time to adopt, and all of my anxiety needed somewhere to go.) Reading this thread makes me wish I'd had this community of Witches to help me vet names—so many beautiful and creative solutions to various naming conundrums!
We have friends who named their son Scott, and he’s always complaining about it being “old-fashioned”!!
lol! To me "Scott" = o.g. Teen Wolf. And how could he be old-fashioned.
Not to mention Scott Pilgrim!
Growing up, I hated having a different name. And the Scooby-Doo references were tiring. I went through a phase where I only answered by the name Nancy — I think I wanted to be one of the Eight is Enough sisters. But I've grown to like my name. And recently I've heard it pop more, even some babies with it. My husband is a Brian and complains about his name. So I think I need to thank my mom.
Marlo and Stella. I've always liked two syllables.
love those names! Cute/interesting without being like "Is that even a name???"
Love those names! I like two-syllable names too. Mine are Nora, Konrad, Owen, an Bennett.
My FIL’s name was Thomas and my husbands middle name is Thomas and his older brothers middle name is Thomas and his younger brother is named Thomas and has his grandfathers first name as his middle name 🙃
If we had a boy I really wanted to name him Avi and my husband would agree to it because if you combine Avi and his first name (Michael) first and middle name would translate to “my father who is like god” or something like that. (I still lament that a little, I love the combo Avi Michael the flow feels so good to my brain)
We all ended up being M names, it wasn’t on purpose. All our initials are the same! Even my daughters middle name is an M (named after my husband’s late sister).
We also have Thomases running through our family - it was my grandmother’s last name until she married, then my dad’s name, and my son and a cousin’s son are both Thomas!
I can’t edit *wouldnt agree on the boy name
OMG who was the OG Thomas?? He really got his money's worth.
Pretty sure OG Thomas was my FIL 😂 adored him but not surprised he’d want to do something like that! I think my younger BIL is technically supposed to be a jr but their middle names are *slightly* different.
Are they Greek?? That’s a very Greek thing. My dad’s entire generation has the same middle name (after grandpa) and then there’s a whole naming system - first son is paternal Grandpa name, Dad name; second son is maternal grandpa name, dad name…and then the next generation they switch - middle name is first name, first name is middle, over and over until everyone is a Nicholas. My maiden name is very uncommon and there are essentially 15 men with the same exact name.
Nope, Dutch and mostly Irish on his side!
I have a friend named Tommy, and every time he meets someone named Tommy, he asks who they are named after because Tommys are almost always named after someone. My son Tommy (age 11 tomorrow - eek) shares his name with my brother Tommy, my father Big Tom, my husband's grandfather Tom, my husband's uncle Tommy, and my husband's cousin Tommy (on the other side from the uncle and grandfather). Even though we have six Tom/Tommy's, my son is the only Tommy Donnelly so we rolled with it! His middle name is Paul, after my FIL.
All of the men on my side have the same middle name!
My mother, the least creative woman on the planet, intentionally named us what she believed were flexible, common names-- Kathleen and Margaret. (Clearly she whiffed a bit.) Then she called us Katie and Peggy, which are more or less the same name. But she was not content with this. When considering middle names, she decided that I needed a short middle name, and being boring went with "Ann." Then she got to Peggy, figured a short middle name was also necessary, decided against Sue for obvious reasons, shrugged and picked "Ann" again. There was no reasoning behind "Ann" other than it was short and a name.
(This also subjected not just Peggy, but also me, to a childhood of explaining to people in our small non-Irish Catholic town that Peggy is a reasonably common nickname for Margaret.)
noooooo!!! Oh man she must have been so tired to just do "Ann" again. Did you/your sister get confirmed and did you go for juicy saint names to spice it up?
Our stupid CCD program *mandated* that you use your existing name if it was a saint. So we were stuck. (I tried to lobby that Kathleen and Catherine were different so I could go wild, but I was denied.)
See my comment above re: six people with the first name Tommy in our immediate circle of relatives and my eldest son being named for his two grandfathers...beyond that, my great-great grandmother was Agnes, my great-grandmother was Louise Agnes, my grandmother was Grayce Louise, my mother is Paula Grayce, I am Maeve Grayce, and my daughter is Maura Grayce. My grandmother's actual legal first name was Grace but when she was in college, all of her friends added a "y" to their names for fun and elegance, and hers stuck. Now it is a legacy. Everyone calls my daughter Maeve by accident; we didn't anticipate this, but I guess our names are similar enough and no one expects a young Maura or a middle-aged Maeve. Maura's first name came about by combining the names of her grandmothers (MAUReen and paulA). We also have Colin Cotter, whose middle name is also my husband's middle name and his mother's maiden name. When we called my parents to announce his birth and share his name, my dad thought we were saying "Connor Connor Donnelly" instead of "Colin Cotter Donnelly." He kept repeating that (with joy) very loudly on the phone, obviously not thinking reasonably about the fact that we would never give our child the same first AND middle name. Our kids' first initials are T, C, and M, which are the same first initials of me and my siblings (Maeve, Tommy, and Caitlin). Anyway, I think Tommy, Colin, and Maura hang well together as basic Irish-American sibling names.
We definitely do the honorary names in my family - my dad was Thomas, after his dad, and my maternal grandfather was also Thomas; it's a middle name for one of my nephews and if I'd had a second boy I would have named him Thomas. My grandmother and mother are Kathleen; that's my middle name and I gave it to my daughter, too. My mom and her sisters all have Mary or Marie as middle names - Catholics! As for theme: I gave my kids Irish first names - my husband got the last name, which is Russian, so they have pretty unique names.
Hi, it's me. The Irish Ukrainian.
My middle name is Anne and my brother’s was Anthony 🫣 Half the men on my dad’s side of the family are named John or Dave, and at a recent family reunion there was a photo of 4 or 5 Reeses (in that case a conscious choice to keep the name active in the family, which I think is pretty cool). We have a cousin Anthony on my dad’s side as well.
I’m Claire and my sibs are Luke Kate and Jeanne - always felt like Jeanne as the baby got the slightly more adventurous name. My mom wanted to name me Chloe but it was vetoed by my dad so instead she named me after her mom she didn’t get alone with? I don’t know.
I have the same middle name as my mom, which is also her sister’s first name. My sister gave her daughter our sister’s middle name. So middle names are a big shared thing on my side.
My girls are Penelope, who we’ve always called Poppy and Fallon so I feel like they’re very different. I chose the first and my spouse the latter. We’re from very different backgrounds so I feel like they give pretty different vibes. And Fallon’s middle name is Artemis, while Poppy’s is after my sister Kate.
Found out yesterday that a coworker is a "V"....like he's the 5th in his family line with his name. craziness.
There was a IV invited to our wedding and I forgot what # he is and called him a "III" on the invite and I think it was perceived as a bit of a dig. I'm sorry but I can't keep count at that point!
My kids are Avery and Emily (and both of their middle names are alliterative) and our last name ends with an "ee" sound. I'm Kristy. So many Ys, so many vowels.
I have a ton of John/Jons in my life. My dad, my husband, an uncle, a cousin, another cousins husband. So many that we had to start calling all of them by their full names haha.
I have two sons named Luke and Ben - my daughter bemoans that these are ‘basic’ names 😀 I liked that they were strong and simple and easy to spell (their surname is not …) So yes I guess we fall into the same name twice category - single syllable, Anglo, biblical names (Benjamin)
They're good! Nobody will misspell them and there are lots of good famous Lukes and Bens for them to emulate :)
I also have a Luke! Our last name ends in "y" so I was hellbent on a full consonant stop first name and my husband vetoed Julian and Declan. My daughter is Harper for similar reasons and also because my husband vetoed Oona, Alice, Charlotte, and Julia. I'm still sad/mad about Oona.
I have an Una! See previous comment. Have always loved the name, either spelling, but because she's a first born twin we went with "Una"
We frequently say "Una is such an Una!"
Your husbands vetos are a little wack IMO!
Love all your girls pics …. My husband chose our daughter’s name and I gave her my mum’s first name as her middle - Margaret (a name I love and hope will make a comeback)
My husband vetoed "Valerie." Although now I can't imagine living with a 10 year old girl named Valerie, tbh.
My last name is a beast, easy to spell first name was essential for us when going one for M.
I named both of my kids vaguely European-sounding names with slightly distinct spellings. However, they both have "weird" middle names and I really wanted to name them Casimir and Fraxinus, but got overruled by my ex.
I can't speak to Fraxinus but you know the Poles in Chicagoland would have gone nuts for a li'l baby Casimir.
Dude, right? He'd have been the honorary president of the Copernicus Center by now.
My mom was rooting for an Anton or Andre (Andrzej). My kid would have a completely different personality if he was named Anton, I have no doubt.
My twin boys' names are both pretty Irish, which I didn't do on purpose but they are family names and husband and I are both pretty Irish genetically, so it happened. My other choice on my husband's side was his Italian grandfather who was named Michael but...
My sister-in-law married a Mike (my brother), her dad was a Mike, her brother is a Mike (Jr) and her sister married a Mike. I wasn't about to bring another Mike into the mix.
Not to mention my husband's last name, Durr, makes any first name sound like you are saying "-ed her". So that ruled out Ben, Bill, and a host of others. My brother, the hilarious jokester, wanted me to name one of my kids "Fender Benjamin" so that his name could be Fender Bender.
I mentioned my twins' names below - Maya and Lily, and their brother is Wyatt, so more a vibe than a rule.
However, my high school friends had an all-time great name scheme: one was Thomas Olaf Meyer, and the other was James Isaac Meyer so their initials were T.O.M. and J.I.M., which were the nicknames they both went by. Unsurprisingly their dad is nerdy engineer-inventor type.
Dude, my family doesn't seem to have this, but the old neighbors, no joke, Dustin, Justin, and Rustin. I think Rustin eventually went by Steve or something.
RUSTIN!!! Naw
My name is Kate and my brother's name is Nate. My parents gave us longer versions of those names and (still!) seem genuinely surprised that we wound up with rhyming nicknames, despite those being the most common variants of each. We grew up in an echoey house and whenever one of us got yelled for, both of us ignored it because you could never hear the first letter clearly and we both had plausible deniability.
My wife has a coworker who let his oldest son name their third child(!!) and he named the baby Jack. Oldest son's name is John. I know those are technically two different names, but still. I think the kid was 9 or 10 at the time.
Kate and Nate is adorable; I would read that book.
Bless my mother who was probably just insane with 4 children and the oldest barely 7 when she decided the newborn must be named Dan NOT Daniel JUST Dan because if she named him Daniel, he might get called Danny which she actually didn’t mind, but if he was called Danny then his then 3yo older brother, a Thomas generally called Tom, might get called Tommy which she despised. Which, cows out of the barn lady!?! But also yes my mom has adhd why do you ask?
My grandfather, whose name was John, named my uncle John Christian, but whenever anyone called out “John,” it was hard to tell who they were talking about, so my mom called him Chris. Then John Christian had a son and named him Christian, and everyone called his son Chris, so his wife and other kids went back to calling John Christian “John,” in order to not mix him up with his son. But my mom and dad and sister and I still call him Chris, so it gets very confusing when the extended family gets together and we talk about “Chris” and “John” but that can mean three different people, or the same person.
this is so funny. I guess this is the upside to the olden days when people would give people nicknames that came out of the blue just to tell people apart. My MIL is named Barbara but goes by "Tudy" and my old bf's mom's name was Karen but went by "Susie."
I basically named our dog the same thing as our firstborn. The kid has two extra consonants, but it is noticeably similar... to everyone except me, apparently! I didn't realize it until about six months after I named him.
The kids share a long O sound, and I notice that a lot in sibling names, that affinity for a particular vowel (presumably in the context of the last name.
Ha! When I was a kid, my dad often couldn't immediately spit out the proper name for the kid whose attention he wanted, so he would cycle through the three kids' names and the dog's name and just assume he had it covered. Then at some point, he settled on "Fred"—which was no one's name—as an all-purpose "hey you."
One of the kids has name very similar to the cat. Fully did not realise until the kid was 6+ months. Only possible defence is they don't look the same written down...?!
I have two boys named Sam and Gus - both one syllable and sort of old fashioned/old man names. Also, my husband goes by his middle name, which is something that I always swore I would never do before I had kids. It just seemed unnecessarily complicated to me. Why not just name the kid what you actually want to call him? Then I did something even worse to my kid. Gus's legal name is John August. I wanted to name him after my grandfather John, but August John didn't sound right to me. I also didn't want to add another John to the family because I already have two uncles named John and brother named Jonathan who goes by Jon. Plus, personality-wise he's just such a Gus. So now he goes by a nickname based on his middle name. Sorry dude. You're going to be explaining that one forever. That is still not as weird as what my paternal grandparents did with their kids' names. My dad is one of five who all have D names - Dan, Donna, Doug, Dennis, and Dennis. That's right - two kids named Dennis. My dad had an older brother who died as an infant who was named Dennis George. When my dad was born a few years later, they named him Dennis George II! I cannot fathom why they would do that.
My grandmother had two sisters named Mary. The first had her middle name bestowed by my great-grandmother's SILs, and she always went by that (there were like 10 SILs, so they held a lot of sway). With the 4th girl, my great-grandmother tried again - but this Mary was always called May.
Historically reusing the deceased infant or small child’s name again is very common.
Also, I am married to a non old man Sam. He is just an early middle aged sam.
That is a LOT to lay on a kid, woof! But they were probably thinking of it as a tribute, I suppose.
We went with 'old fashioned' family names. Our oldest is Margaret Louise -- named after my husband's great-grandmother. Our son is Henry Edward. There are Edwards on both sides of the family, and I just always knew that if we had a son I wanted to name him Henry and call him Hank. My FILs middle name was H -- just the letter, no name -- so I maintain that they probably wanted him to be William Henry and whoever did the birth certificate just whiffed and made him officially Billie H.
I really wanted to make Hank's middle name Kermit, 100% after the frog. I called him Kermit when he was still in the womb. But, my husband vetoed it.
I went to high school with a family of five sons and I’m still acquainted with one of them 25 years later. Every one of them had the same first name; to keep them straight, they were referred to as One, Two, Three, Four, and Five. (I wish I could reveal it here, as it’s a beautiful and somewhat unusual name, but I want to respect their privacy so I won’t.)
My name is Carolyn which seems like no big deal, except for all of my 44 years on earth most people, other than family and close friends, call me Caroline. Even when I spell it out letter by letter, people write Caroline. Even when they ask, is it Carolyn or Caroline and I say ‘Carolyn’, they say great, I love the name Caroline. I’ve only known one Caroline in my life and she said people would always call her Carolyn. Must be a glitch in the matrix, that’s the only thing that makes any sense
My son is Isaac and daughter Natalie because we wanted names that translate in Russian (hubs is Russian). My daughter is named after my grandma Nettie, too.
Long story long, never not plugging this article which is the closest thing my second born daughter will have to a baby book 💕https://nameberry.com/blog/how-i-named-my-baby-natalie-mara
My first had a name that is hard to yell, starts with a vowel. Didn’t make that mistake again! Haha
My oldest is Margaret and my younger is Elizabeth and because I'm a British historian my history friends assume we named them after the royal family but in the wrong order. But no, Margaret is named after my grandmother and we both liked Elizabeth. Margaret's middle name, Elise, was chose by her paternal grandma and Elizabeth's is Kathleen after her maternal grandma.
My mother's father was Delbert and he had 2 brothers, Eberhard and Dana, all given names my great-grandparents thought no one could create a nickname for because they hated nicknames (why??). But Delbert was always called Mike as his last name was Myrick, so that was a failure.
We have "Little Laura", "Grandma Laura" (whose given name is actually Rose?), "Actual Laura" (as opposed to Laura-But-Really-Rose-Laura), and "Regular Laura" (who didn't want to be called "Big Laura" or "Older Laura," so... all anyone else could come up with was apparently "regular.") I can't.
I'm loving these name stories! In my extended family on my mom's side, for awhile we had a Connie, Bonnie and Ronnie. In my generation on that same side, we have a Kelti, Kelsey, Kasey, Carly, and Kate. Bless my late grandmother (Connie) ... she used to call both me (Kelsey) and my cousin (Kelti) her own blended combination that sounded something like "Keltzy." We're less than a year apart so we were always together anyway, and I thought it was an adorable shared nickname.
My husband’s sister is named Katharine but goes my Katie. My name is Katherine (goes by Katherine or Kat) and his brother married a Katherine (goes by Kate). So both brothers married a woman with their sister’s name
My kids are Max, Lucy, Scarlett, and Finn. The only pattern I really see is that Max and Lucy both have their own Beatles songs. (His full name is Maxwell and they have a song called Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, which is actually a creepy song.) I am a big Beatles fan, but I did not do this on purpose. In fact, we almost went with Sadie for Scarlett, partly because it also has a Beatles song. But she was a Scarlett. Max and Scarlett do have a similar sound to them perhaps. Finn’s full name is Finneus. I wish we had gone with an as at the end, because it looks prettier and no one seems able to pronounce it with this spelling.
As for confusing names, my mother, brother, grandfather, uncle, two aunts, and two cousins all went by their middle names. Also, my grandfather Tom (the one who went by his middle name) has several namesakes. My nephew Thomas and his own son Tom. And my husband has an Uncle Tom.
Plus, there are two Madisons and two Saras (including myself). Six of my aunts have Mary as their first name. (Roman Catholic.) And the icing on the cake - my older brother and my stepdad are both named Jerry. We tried calling them Jerry 1 and Jerry 2, but realized most of us were calling the older Jerry Jerry 1, because he was older, while my mother insisted on calling my brother Jerry 1, because he was in her life first. We abandoned all that and just use last names and initials when we aren’t speaking to them directly.
Omg yep, didn’t even realize that either!!
My boys’ names are very different (Hilliard and Solomon) but they go by the nicknames of Hill and Sol, which have a lot of similarity in length and sound!
The main takeaway might be: parenthood and pregnancy are exhausting, and no matter how much time is spent on name selection…it IS really possible not to make alllllll the realizations. 😂
For myself, I had what I thought were hard naming rules and I abandoned almost all of them for names I just liked the best!
1) As a Gretchen with a little sister named Emily…it was VERY important that my kids’ names were around the same popularity. Of course now getting personalized anything is super easy…but I bore the scars of the 70s and 80s LOL.
2) I wanted names with nickname options, because…SEE ABOVE.
3) I didn’t want to repeat initials.
Everything else went out the window! I didn’t want a name with a “th” sound because that’s how our last name ends. Oops - 1st kid’s name starts with Th! Nickname I loved best for kid #2 is a little choppy with our last name - don’t care! Kid #3’s nickname is a bit of a stretch and I rarely use it bc I like her given name more - literally a non issue in real life!
I would say my kids’ names have the same vintage/grandparent style, but they don’t rhyme or get mixed up.
oh i love this discussion! our last name is Stepaniak which is a mouthful. i get called Stephanie ALL the time which never happened when my last name was Burke. and P.S. is not my name.
we named all our kids kind of two syllable, simple names bc the last one is such a mouthful. my husband wanted Benjamin for the first and i was like that is just too much. we also tried for Marcus Jr but it was just too weird
their names are Jakob Kai, Oskar Liam, Kaleb Danek and Sophia Rose. so yeah, we have a K thing going...that was not my original spelling for Jakob but my friend misspelled it and i was like that is genius! goes with the last name! so we ran with that for three boys. Sophia was my pick when we first got pregnant and i have loved the name ever since so when she was a girl, that was just it.
i definitely found naming the boys harder -not just for the K thing....but the list of girls names i likes was pages long...
and i pretty much just ran right over my husband bc he started saying things with number 2 and 3 like Zeus and Theophillis which are fine, but we are not Greek, and just no. he wanted Tigerlilly for the girl and i was like we are not Native American either...🤦♀️. so he was cut off from naming privileges 😂😂
ha!! I really liked the name "India" for a girl in theory but we are not Indian nor have ever been to India and I was like that may be a tough sell. Anyway no girls came and there are like 4 boys names to choose from so here we are in basicville.