Let’s see if we can find a Christian/first/given name that is unique to the one person who has (or had) it. It would be best if the name is not just an alternate (or weird) spelling of a more commonly spelled name like Antoine or Jimmy.
I’ve looked at these and have found that at least one other person, beyond the famous one I had thought of, also has it:
My wife’s first name appears to be unique, as far as we’ve ever been able to tell. But if I post it here, she’ll hurt me–she’s very protective of her Internet privacy.
Plus, somebody as crazy as her mom might see it, and inflict it on another helpless child.
I share your concerns. My father’s first name was quite uncommon and I have never known anyone with that same name. However, I did a Yahoo! search on his name and found some others. Even so, mentioning his name would not be a good privacy move on my part.
Interesting–I hadn’t thought of an SSDI search! There are no matches for my wife’s first name when I include the diacritical mark her mother thoughtfully threw in; but there are four individuals with the matching letters, which is four more than I expected. Three of them have the same last name but different middle initials, were born about twenty to twenty-five years apart, and died in Louisville, KY, which leads me to think that this was a traditional name in that particular family.
Google searches never turned up anything useful. Her name is apparently a fairly common verb in Lithuanian, so I’d get pages and pages of stuff I can’t read.
You can also throw in wildcards in the SSDI search, so you can find some interesting first names that may or may not be results of transcription errors. For example, the SSDI has a unique entry for AAAANDA, which I have to assume is a screwed-up entry for AMANDA. There is also a QZ (perhaps OZ), as well as a ZZLTAN (certainly ZOLTAN) and ZZARA (which may actually be a real name, for all that I know.)
Missed this one, the SSDI has an entry for FERDINAND, DELFEAYO J JR, so I presume there’s at least two more Delfeayos out there.
Same issue here, but with a friend. His name is unique but I’m not going to post it here. No hits on the SSDI, every hit on Google is him, every kind of search we’ve tried comes up empty or just him. What’s funniest to me is that his name looks and sounds completely normal. If I spoke the name you would be able to spell it correctly without having to guess. It didn’t even occur to me when I met him that I had never heard the name before. It’s 8 letters long and sounds like it should be a name (and is his name, of course), but as far as we can tell his mother made up a unique name.
Not that anybody has to be champing at the bit to use the name, but Zezozose doesn’t appear on the SSDI (I didn’t use any alternate spellings so they might appear there after all) in spite of the fact that Manson Family’s Susan Atkins named a child that.
