Over in this thread there is discussion of amusing names of couples, but I was curious if anyone had encountered amusing children’s names in families. For example the Duggars name all of their children with names starting with J.
My own example is my Dad’s family where all 14 children have 5 letter names ending in Y. My grandparents also went by their nicknames, which had 5 letters and ended in Y. They claim that they didn’t see the pattern until naming child number 5 or 6 which is just bizarre but seems to be true.
I’ve always thought giving the son the exact same name as his father was a little odd (my father, older brother, & nephew all have the same name). One of my classmates was a IV.
Also given mixed-sex fraternal twins the masculine & feminine versions of the same name (ie Joeseph & Joesephine). That’s just creepy.
A family in my hometown named all four of their boys “B” names. More interestingly, they then gave each kid a “B” nickname (Beamer, Badger, Boomer, and Booker). These nicknames are all the kids go by, to the point where no one knows any of their real names beyond that they begin with B. And lest you think this is just a kid thing that they’ll grow out of, the oldest is now 21 and still goes exclusively by Beamer.
A branch of my family has lots of twins. They seem to specialize in giving them names that I would find hard to use. Example: Stacy and Tracy, Jean-Ann and Jeanine (pronounced ja-NEEN), Harold and Darold.
A friend of my son’s, every kid’s middle name is Michael. John Michael, Stephen Michael, David Michael–and they go by both names. I thought the family’s last name was Michael. It’s not.
I think the Duggers are crazy; if I were going to have a whole bunch of children I would never have picked one initial to start all their names with. Although if you’re doing that I guess J is a good one. And I suppose starting with A would have just encouraged them not to stop until they had 24 kids.
Our friends gave each of their 5 boys names that begin with “Z”. And they used names from the Bible. I’m glad they stopped before they had to use “Zerubbabel”.
A long, long time ago, this young girl made a promise to Our Lady, that if she got to marry “the tall blonde gentleman”, she’d name all her children María.
Thus, José María (“Joseph Mary”, which in Spain is considered a single name), Francisco Javier María (Xavier Mary, Francisco Javier being a single name again), Jaime María Pedro Pablo (James Mary Peter Paul, who got the extras on account of having been born on the Feast of Sts Peter and Paul), Ignacio María (Ignatius Mary) and María Teresa (called Maite).
My parents knew one thing for sure when it came to discussing children’s names: no María Teresas or Teresas. My mother, her MiL and her SiL were all María Teresas and two of them are called Maite: both considered that saddling any hypothetical daughter with “Maite the Fourth” would have been cruel.
Somewhere up my family tree are two brothers named “A” and “B”. Let me make this clear: they don’t have names that start with these letters. Thier names are “A” and “B”.
I remember hearing about this and thinking, “Goddamn, those are some lazy-ass unimaginative parents!”.
My ex wife and I both have the same initials. We named our daughter so that she would also have the same initials. I’d imagine if we stayed married and had more kids, those kids also would have had the same initials. Part of the reason for that was that there was a lot of name coincidences between our families. We both had brothers with the same names, dating girls with the same names. Both of our mom’s had the same initials etc…
In my family (including myself) a first son gets three names plus the family name. It goes like this:
First name (Grandfather’s First Name) (Father’s First Name) Family Name
So had I any sons (only daughters who may or may not pick up the concept) they would have my first name as their third name and my third name as their second name.
On Lady Chance’s side (the Irish grouping) all the first boys have ‘Charles’ as their first name but use their middle name as their ‘name’. So her father was ‘Wilson’ and her brother is ‘Michael’ with both first names being ‘Charles’.
One of my dad’s cousins has 6 children, all girls, all of whose names begin with K. One of these I’ve only spelled with C elsewhere and two others are usually spelled with C.
I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I’ve given each of my four kids names of British monarchs. We’ve got George, James, Charles, and Katherine. Too bad we’re all done with having kids, or we’d have probably wound up with a Henry and maybe an Elizabeth or II.
Odd family coincidence: Both my grandfathers were named Frank. And both THEIR fathers were named Frank.
A friend of mine has a family tradition where the father’s name becomes the first son’s middle name. So, Richard John names his son Eric Richard, and his son is Michael Eric, etc. It’s a nice way to keep continuity without “junioring” anyone.
I also know a couple named Christopher and Christina. Their kids’ middle names are Christopher and Christina. I think it’s cute. Unfortunately, these kids also have long first names and a very long last name, so they’ll need to wear name sashes instead of name tags when they get their first jobs at Burger King.
My wife (whose name begins with Ch) named our kids Chantal and Christopher. It didn’t occur to us until after the second one was born that their names start with Ch as well as my wife’s. At least it didn’t occur to me, I’m about 95% sure it didn’t occur to my wife either, but there is that 5% chance that it was deliberate.
(The way I remember picking out the names was going through a baby book and deciding which names we liked. Those were the names we came up with (actually we came up with the middle names first, but the girl’s name we liked best (Gabrielle) we didn’t want to use because it could get shortened to “Gabby” and the boy’s name we chose (Robert) was the same as my dad’s name (but it was deliberate, to name him after both grandfathers (my father-in-law was a Robert too)), so our first choices got relegated to middle names and the second choices got promoted to first name. That kind of rigmarole tells me that the “Ch” coincidence was just that. Also, for the second pregnancy, since the girl’s name was used, we just reused the boy’s name, and debated over the choice for girl’s name, neither one liked the name the other one liked, and was never decided. Thankfully the second one was a boy and we didn’t have to decide but, for the record, neither of the girl’s names that were being considered began with a “Ch”.)
In terms of strange names, my maternal grandfather’s parents were Cecil and Cecil - pronounced differently (and I’ve never heard of Cecil as a girl’s name, at least not spelled that way). Also, when I was in my early 20s, I wanted to name my first son Mark Alan Robert Kendall or Jack Andrew Clinton Kendall - look at the initials and you’ll know why I got a kick out of that. (No, I couldn’t think of a girl’s name that matched the pattern.) Thankfully I got that out of my system before I actually reproduced, but if I hadn’t I’m sure my wife would have talked me out of it.
Wow … I was going to post about a family I knew in California back in the early 1990s that had this same pattern, but I think they only had 4 boys. I even used the same “Zerubbabel” joke with them. I can almost bet we are talking about the same people.
The family I knew lived in the San Fernando Valley, in California.
There was a guy in college whose last name was Nemec. He swore if he ever had a son, he was going to name him Kurt T. Nemec and see how long it took the kid to figure out that his name backwards was CemenT Truk.
I’ve mentioned this on here before, but I knew a family of three girls named Vonda Wynette, Rhonda Annette and Shonda Lynette. They all went by their middle names.
