I knew a family that had 5 children, and named every one of them Ripley (boys & girls alike).
mmm
That’s pretty similar to Ashkenazic Jewish tradition. You name the baby after a relative who passed away (but generally not one who died as an infant).
I’ve known several families who did the everyone must have the same first initial thing. Growing up, there were several branches of the same family in town and when discussing one family we would say “one of the “D” Smiths” because all the boys in that family (8 of them) had names starting with a D. Most of them completely made up and ending with an “N.”
A friend of mine had to name all her children names starting with a K because that’s what her husband insisted on. She was ok with it, but naming baby number four was quite the six month ordeal because they couldn’t agree on a name.
I broke family tradition when naming my sons. In my husband’s family it was tradition for one kid of each generation to be named “James Robert.” It had to be a nephew being named after an uncle. My husband wanted to follow that tradition. I always thought that I would jump on any opportunity to have a kid with a IV in their name. I found my limit though. I hate the name James. I hate the name Robert. And the two together? Awful. There was no way in heck any son of mine was going to be “Jim Bob.”
My husband’s Japanese, as I am sure you are all sick of reading. I have friends whose children have been discriminated against by having a foreign name (worst example was one whose daughter came first in an elementary school kanji contest but was demoted to second so as not to demoralise the “real” Japanese - this was in the early 1990’s, but it still shocked me.)
So we decided that our children would have totally Japanese names and thus be able to hide on exams and stuff. No way can they hide in real life, they look like me…
My husband’s name means “Pure Tree” with two characters. We took the “Tree” part of his name and added another character for each kid. Our first son is a “Graceful Tree” and our second is a “Spring (or new season) Tree”
There is a recent-ish trend in Japan for full Japanese families to give their kids “western names.” The problem is that they don’t actually know what are reasonable names. This results in kids that I have met, personally being called things like:
Raimu (pronounced like Lime - as in sour fruit, or Lyme, as in not very nice disease… A boy.)
Earth (pronounced Arse. No further comment needed. Boy.)
Tomorrow (boy)
Hot (unfortunately a girl)
Eifuu (April, as the irritated mother told me when I failed to work out what name this could possibly be. A boy.)
Okuto (October - April’s brother)
Jura (as in ssic Park?? Really meant to be July - a girl.)
Ones I have not met - an English teacher colleague swears they have met twin girls called Milk and Cocoa. Another friend has a sea-loving friend who named their girl Marine (not too bad) and the son Yotto (yacht).
My family doesn’t have any traditions. My father is obsessed but that’s not a tradition.
He insisted that all his children be named after the Virgin Mary and a Catholic saint. This was all well and good with his three oldest kids (my sisters and me), even though he did insist on getting strange with my name (goddamn middle name of Madonna in the 80’s).
I was wondering what he was going to do with his son. Was he really going to name him after the Virgin Mary? Well, he ended up going with a saint and an archbishop instead. His last daughter was named after 2 saints.
The 3 of us named after the Mary and Catholic saints ended up being Athiest, Baptist, and Agnostic.
My boyfriend’s aunt and uncle named all 7 of their children (6 girls and a boy) with the same initials (KAR).
My best friend is named Christine. Her brother is Christopher. His wife is Kristin.
I knew a family that named their kids Holly, Nick, Noelle, and Christmas. IIRC, Noelle and Christmas were twin girls. I think there were more kids, but that is all that I can remember.
I have a set of distant cousins whose very Catholic mother named them Maureen (a variation of Mary), Virginia (a reference to the Virgin), Madonna (the non-singer) and…Kate 
(no clue).
I also know a family where each of the kids has a first name that starts with a C that the parents must have created especially for them. One, for example, is Cinjyn (I might have the vowels wrong). Their middle names are animals-Hawk and Fawn are the two I remember. Each kid goes by a more conventional nickname.
A neighbor of ours had seven children, all named starting with “D”. And the farm was named the 7-D Ranch.
I once knew three brothers. The eldest was named Larry, which is normal enough, but the second two were both named Darryl. No middle names as far as I know.
One of our agents was married to a man who insisted she got pregnant until she had a boy and that any child would have to have a variation of his name.
She had girls Nickelia and later Dominicka before giving birth to Dominick 8 months later!
She later left the abusive asshole.
It was inadvertent up to the last kid with my family too. My parents are D* and E*, I’m A*, and my first brother was named B* before my parents realized what was going on and gave the new baby a C name.
Uh, I have two brothers, but is this a pun on me ‘outing’ myself?
I’m Ashkenazi Jewish on one side and yes, this naming convention gets used - a child gets named with the same first letter as the name of someone who has died. My first brother was named using this convention. However, I was named according to my Greek family’s tradition, which is that you choose the name of a living relative and give your child that name or the same first letter as was my case. I imagine there were some pretty heated debates over this because the superstition for Ashkenazi Jews is that naming the kid after a living relative means that relative is going to die! (Thankfully they didn’t go with the other Greek tradition of giving daughters their father’s middle name.)
A friend of mine, whose name begins with C, ended up marrying a man who also has a C name. Before they were together, she had a baby (given a C name) with a different guy (a G, not a C).
After C & C married, they had two daughters. The first was given a C name, not because of the initial, but because her mom loves it and had been planning for years to use it for her first girl.
When the second daughter was born, Mom C and Dad C decided they had to give her a C name so she wouldn’t feel singled out when she got older.
So. Five C names in one house, mostly by accident.
Sir Paul McCartney’s family seems to have a knack for marrying people with names that are already in the family.
He had two great-great grandmothers named Jane and a long time girlfriend/fiance named Jane.
Grandfather Owen was the son of a Mary who married a Mary, who gave birth to Paul’s Mother Mary.
Paul had a stepmother and a sister-in-law both named Angela.
His wife Linda had two grandmothers named Stella.
Linda had a daughter named Heather, and Paul’s second wife was Heather.
His first two sons-in-law were Alistair and Alasdhair
My grandmother’s five siblings each picked a letter and stuck with it when naming their kids and for the most part their kids followed suit.
For example, Grandma has twin brothers, Elvin and Melvin. Elvin gave all his kids ‘R’ names, Elvin went with ‘J’ names.
Every other year there’s a family reunion. We’re the only family that lives in Northern Idaho so I don’t know my large extended family all that well. You can imagine how strange it was to attend one of these reunions as a kid. The naming convention was weird enough but I shit you not, one year they had color-coded t-shirts for every branch of the family.:eek:
The few parents that buck the naming convention tend to name their kids with a letter from a different branch.:smack: As a youngster I assumed they did this just to screw with me.
Growing up, my friend’s grandmother had 7 sisters and all 8 of them had the first name of Mary. (Why, yes, they were Catholic, why do ask?) They all went by their middle names except for the oldest who got to use Mary. Unfortunately for my friend’s grandmother (my friend was also named Mary), she was the youngest and got stuck with Wilhelmina…
In my immediate family all of us kids have “R” names, as does Dad. Mom’s name started with “M”, the freak…
I knew a family with a bunch of daughters all given “-ene” names. Darlene, Colene, Jolene, etc. When they had a son they named him Jerry. No idea why.
From the Wiki article on Lyndon Baines Johnson:
Johnson married Claudia Alta Taylor (already nicknamed “Lady Bird”) of Karnack, Texas on November 17, 1934… They had two daughters, Lynda Bird, born in 1944, and Luci Baines, born in 1947. Johnson enjoyed giving people and animals his own initials; his daughters’ given names are examples, as was his dog, Little Beagle Johnson.
We didn’t plan it that way, but our three sons’ first initials, in birth order, are J, E and T. My wife and I have the initials S and W, so we joke about our family being “SWJET” or “Southwest Jet.”
There’s an old joke that the founder of the Lear Jet Company had three daughters, which he named Gonda, Chanda and Cava.
Comedian Ralphie May has two kids: a daughter, April June May, and a son, August May.
Some of these “naming conventions” get a little bit carried away. I used to work with a guy whose first and middle initial were K.L., as were his parents. Nobody else in his family, but he decided that his children would all carry the initials K.L. All seven of them. Sure, it started out normally, but some of those names were really reaching or just plain made up.
My brothers are Mark & Mike. Mom & Dad thought that was cute. My sister is Carol. The naming system was blown when Mom decided that she liked my name spelled better with a “K.”
Still, it used to be a pain in the house when mail would arrive addressed to “Mr. M. Surname.” My brothers would fight over it. Then as they got older and started to receive bills they’d fight over it in a completely different way. 
One of my great aunts did the “-ene,” sound, ending 4 of her daughters names with it. The 5th went by 2 initials, the second of which was an “E.”
I never thought to ask (but will now) what the initials stood for, since I’m from a place where I’m used to seeing funny names, especially from certain eras. I wouldn’t be surprised if the “E” stood for the “ene” sound also.
A paternal aunt named all of her sons with the middle name “Lee.” One of her daughters gave her son that middle name also.