If my name is the same as my father’s name, I can choose to be called “What’shisname Jr.” Is there a similar term for a daughter and a mother having the same name?
edited to add: And what about female variations of “What’sHisName The Third”? and so on down the line?
GQ answer: it’s the same as for men. There are a small number of examples of female Jr.'s, and probably a few female III’s.
Non-GQ addition: …but women generally aren’t vain enough to name their kids like this.
You can also go with a roman numeral two and pronounce it, “the second.” That is gender-neutral and easily lends itself two “third” and “fourth”. But I don’t recommend it.
Speaking from personal experience, my sister and my mother had the exact same first and middle name. I never heard anyone call her “junior” or “the second”. It wasn’t a problem for us because we never called my mother by her first name, either called her “mom” or “mother” or “momma”. But it has wreaked havoc with my sister’s credit report. And on one occasion she almost went to jail for a case of mistaken identity.
My sister wrote a check at a gas station (circa 1981) for something like $2.89 but she didn’t write it out “two dollars and eighty-nine cents”, she wrote “two dollars and 89/100”. On top, and down below, her nine looked a lot like a seven. So the bank only honored it for $2.87 instead. The gas station got mad about the two cents and called our house demanding two cents. My mom answered the phone and told them they must be mistaken because she didn’t write any such check. So the gas station called the police and said it was check fraud. A sherrif’s deputy showed up at our house with a warrant for my sister’s arrest. Fortunately, she wasn’t home. The gas station agreed to drop the charges after she paid them the two cents. This never would have happened if my mom and sister didn’t have the exact same name. My mom would have said on the phone “oh, you need to talk to my daughter. Here she is.” and they could have settled it right then. Of course, you could also say it never would have happened if the gas station hadn’t been such jerks about two cents, or if my sister had better handwriting, or if she had bothered to write out the cents in words instead of numbers.
To this day, my sister has to check and double check her credit report and remove loans that are actually signed by my mom. Sometimes years will go by without any confusion and then out of the blue her TWR will say she has two mortgages on two different houses.
Junior is typically used when you have the same name as your parent. The Second (II) is used when the name has skipped a generation, e.g. you have the same name as your grandparent.
is it vanity or that traditionally women have been expected to take their husband’s family name?
That would generally prevent a woman from being a III or higher, but not a Junior. If the woman takes her husband’s name, then her daughter could have the same first and last name as her mother and be a Junior. But if the daughter marries and takes her husband’s last name, then future generations wouldn’t have the same name anymore.
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (daughter of FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt) was named Anna after her mom and grandmother, so she was a Junior (Eleanor Roosevelt’s first name was Anna, but she went by her middle name Eleanor presumably to avoid confusion with her mother Anna). Eleanor Roosevelt’s maiden name was also Roosevelt, but she and her mom had different middle names, so she wasn’t a Junior. If she had been, it could have resulted in the very rare III for a daughter.
What if you have a unisex name that’s shared by a father and daughter, or a mother and son? Though I expect that that’s even more rare.
Interesting question. I imagine it would follow the same rules, but I see no examples or confirmation.
But in my search, I did discover that Cecil addressed the question a few years ago. He doesn’t really have much new info, but I do question one of his conclusions:
Isn’t that confirmation bias? Aren’t we likely to hear only about the juniors/seniors who are of some stature?
When I was typing up Church baptismal records from the 19th century in the UK, I came across a few examples of mother and daughter with the same name. So there was an Elizabeth Jones and her daughter Elizabeth Jones. No “Jr.” or “II .” I would figure that the mother was called “Elizabeth” and the daughter “Liz” or “Beth” or “Bess” even though their official names were the same.
I knew a family with exactly that situation–mother and daughter both named Elizabeth. The mother was called “Betsy,” the daughter was called “Liza.”
No junior, and “Betsy” and “Liza” sound so different that it was easy to forget they actually had the same name.
That’s great for social interactions, but just wait until they try to sign up for credit cards with identical legal names, living at the same address.
100% of the time in my family it’s II for consecutive generations. No juniors anywhere.
I think this is one of those “rules” that few people have heard of and therefore is largely ignored.
You write out the cents words? We actually covered check-writing in 9th grade social studies (ca. 1973), and ‘87/100’ was the standard. Which, since the ‘word’ line on checks ends with the printed word “DOLLARS”, makes more sense to me. Although I hadn’t considered semi-legible numbers.
I am a Junior and when I was younger I was very careful to use it because I was concerned about confusion with my father. Now I have credit cards under at least four different variations of my name, but never been confused with my dad in any way (or had a credit bureau confused about who we are). He’s stayed in the same place while I’ve moved around, perhaps that’s the key.
I’m sure you’re right. I found another cite that Sr/Jr is used when both parties are alive, and II is used when Sr has died. Joe Smith Jr. immediately becomes Joe Smith II on the death of his father.
When it comes to naming, you can follow pretty much whatever rule you want.
Just saw an old Judy Garland movie, Little Nellie Kelly. In the opening credits, Judy is listed as playing both “Nellie Kelly” and her daughter, “Little Nellie Kelly”.
This is freaky: I just now found out that my sister-in-law, who has the same name as my very much missed mother-in-law, had the “Jr.” suffix attached to her name when she grew up.
Or when a nephew is named after an uncle.
I knew a daughter who was named after her father, but it was spelled differently, for some reason. He was Robin, and she was Robyn. I doubt they had the same middle name, but I have no idea.
Also, at one time, it wasn’t that uncommon to name a daughter after a mother-- this was back when families were large, and the bank of names was smaller. It was also a time when it was not necessary to make a sr./jr. distinction between a mother and daughter, because at that time, the mother would be styled “Mrs. John Smith,” and addressed as “Mrs. Smith,” and the oldest daughter was “Miss Smith,” the next “Miss Mary Smith,” the next “Miss Anne Smith.” It didn’t matter which daughter was named after the mother; the daughter was styled differently with her honorific. If Mrs. John Smith and Miss Smith were both close enough to you that you called them by their first names, you were probably also close enough to use nicknames to differentiate them, if it happened that they had the same first name. This is why it was never customary to use sr./jr. with women’s names.
On the rare occasion that it did become necessary, women were sometimes styled “elder” and “younger.” I have seen this in books, and on grave markers. Probably mainly on grave markers, because they don’t tend to have honorifics, other than military ones.
A lot of times people rely on nicknames to differentiate children with the same name as their parents in a social context (which is where we get the Chip/Skip/Trip convention). Since women were not expected to have to function in a business situation, they did not have to worry about using a formal business name that was different from their social nickname, which is why Donald Trump Junior is known by his full name and his sister instead of using her birth name of Ivana Trump Junior, goes by Ivanka. It would be the equivalent of calling the junior Donald “Donny” formally.
And then there are those families that use “little” and “big”.
Phone rings. “Is Tony there?” “Big or little?”