My middle name is unique as a name, but common as an English word. I’m a Jr., same name as my father. His mother picked the name. She died early in his childhood and no one asked her (or remembered) the origin of the name choice. I didn’t want to make my son a IIIrd, didn’t like the sound of it, but I did bequeath him the same middle name to keep the string going.
I am a junior, so my middle name is the same as my father’s, and I’m not sure I can shoehorn it into one of the entries above.
Now, so far as where my father got it. . . Dunno. I have a pretty extensive family family tree on my father’s side, and it might show up as someone else’s middle name, but no one has it as a given name.
My middle name is a mix of my two grandfather’s names with a twist. They took the first part of each father’s name and put them together. My paternal grandfather who’s Okinawan, proudly said that this mix was his real Okinawan name rather than the shortened version he used.
I can’t give the exact meaning of the name because I don’t know how it’s written in Kanji. I don’t know if this is unique to Asian names, but how it’s written in the original non-romanized form can change it’s meaning. A prime example is Akemi, a popular middle name for Japanese girls. However, most Akemi’s don’t know what it means because there’s at least eight different ways to spell it in Kanji.
That has happened in my family, although none has spent more than a trivial amount of time in Appalachia. It may be a broader practice.
So do mine. My niece does, too – her father was one of seven kids, all of whom also had two middle names.
That used to be very common. My mother did that when she married, and as far as I know none of her ancestors came from Appalachia.
I was named after an uncle who died ~20 years before I was born – same first and middle names – so I voted “family given name,” though I don’t know how many others in the family have had it.
No, my family is Jewish. So… pretty sure it wasn’t the Catholic thing.
No middle name and neither of my parents does either. My (younger) brother and sister do though.
I once had the following conversation with a woman I know and like a lot. “Hari what is your middle name?” --“I don’t have one” --“Come on, everyone has a middle name” --“Not me.” --“I promise I won’t tell anybody.” --“Nope, no middle name.” It continued for a couple more exchanges. I’m not sure she believes me to this day. Some day I should show her my birth certificate. From this I am surprised that one doper in eight appears to lack a middle name.
OK, scratch that. Do the males in your family have middle names? If so, like Manda JO suggested above, maybe the assumption was that you’d get married and your maiden name would be your middle name?
Otherwise, I’ve got nothing. 
An old guy I knew long ago told me that he was sent to the Pacific in WWII because he didn’t have a middle name and the powers that be assumed that he was Jewish. He was, in actuality, Catholic.
I never bothered to confirm whether Jewish G.I.s were in fact sent to the Pacific as S.O.P., but I believe he believed it.
Use the same one as Attila the Hun and Smokey the Bear.
Regards,
Shodan
I have an unrelated middle name***, but my mother (born in 1918) had no middle name. She was raised Catholic, and I assume she was confirmed, but she never added that name, if she got it.
*** They just wanted a “long” name because there are only nine letters total in my first and last names combined. Suzanne isn’t such a long name. 
My father wanted my middle name to be the same as his older brother’s first name. My mother insisted my middle name be the same as my father’s middle name. She won! Thankfully!!
That would be a family surname, if you wanted to vote in the poll.
My wife did this, and she didn’t come from anywhere near there.
In her family middle names and first names alternate across generations. Her original middle name was her mother’s name and her mother’s married middle name was her maiden name. Her first name came from her grandmother, and our daughter got it as a middle name.
No.
How about “my family just didn’t have middle names” on my dad’s side.
On neither side of the family did any women do the “move maiden surname to the middle name position”.
On dad’s sid we didn’t even have a surname until we came to America, back in the old country people just had one name and if you had to distinguish between two folks with the same name you’d use “X son/daughter of Y”. A woman “taking her husband’s name” at marriage would have been baffling to them on a certain level - “what, we’re both going to be called David? Wouldn’t that be confusing? Surname? That’s something the nobility have, not us.”
See, this is the thing - the average America is so ensconced in their own cultural conventions regarding naming that either they want to “explain” someone else’s differing practice in their own context (hence, your question about whether we were Catholic and supposed to choose another name later, then asking about whether women in my family usually moved their maiden surname to middle name position after marriage) or just have trouble wrapping their heads around a different custom.
Thus: on my father’s side there were no surnames until we came to the US. There were no middle names. No one saw a need for people to have more than one name where they came from. There’s nothing to explain and nothing complicated. They just didn’t put as many names on a person as has been done for centuries in the west.
My sons have two middle names. Each one has my first name as a middle name, one has her father’s first name, and the other has an unrelated name because my wife liked the sound of it. The other couldn’t have my father’s first name, because he and I have the same first name.
It’s not really a “Catholic” thing to not have a middle name at birth - there’s no shortage of Catholics with four names and there’s no requirement to add a name at Confirmation*. What is kind of unusual in my experience is for a Catholic to actually use their Confirmation name/initial - in fact the only person I can think of who does is George R. R. Martin
For some reason, although my mother insists she has a two-word first name and no middle name, she gave all three daughter’s the first half of her name as a middle name and my brother got my father’s names. Better than being “Juniors” I guess.
- Even in places where a Confirmation name is customary, choosing your Baptismal (which can be your first or middle name) name as a Confirmation name is acceptable - it’s not a requirement to add a new one.
Middle names we’re just one. But Confirmation names ------ Katey-bar-the-door. Many of us ended up Confirmed in several different flavors of the “Catholic Church” and for some reason we usually picked different names rather than just recycle whatever one we used first.
I go by my middle name, and always have. It’s one of the books in the bible. My first name, on the other hand, is almost exclusively a female name. The explanation thereof from my parents is they “thought it sounded nice.” Never used it and never will except on formal documents. Even weirder, my father hated his first name of Harold.