I was just talking with a workmate who told me that her family always uses the same middle name for all the girls in her family and another middle name for all the boys. Coincidentally her husband’s family did the same, so they are continuing the tradition in their family, but my question is… What tradition is this? I’ve never heard of it before. Anyone heard of/know about this?
I think it might be a southern thing. It’s to perpetuate the wife’s family name/names or something. Not sure if that’s the same thing you’re referring to, but hey…it’s better than George Foreman naming all his children George Foreman!
Both my sons have the same middle name (my first name.) It was my wife’s compromise since she didn’t want a kunilou Jr.
Never heard of it outside “Petticoat Junction.”
The question that springs immediately to mind is, which family’s traditional name are they going with? Or are they using both (giving the child two middle names)?
A close friend that I grew up with has the same middle name as her 2 sisters and their mother.
One of her sisters gave each of her three girls two middle names.
One of those middle names, for all three of her daughters, were all the same…the same as her own middle name.
Her oldest daughter just had a baby not long ago, and she also gave the baby the same middle name.
Must be a family thing.
My family did that, but only for girls. I think the origin is religious/Catholic – we all share the middle name Marie, because it was the 1960s. The previous generation all had Mary. As a family, we’re not especially devout – I think it’s more like inertia. Once it got started, it was easier for everyone to keep going with it. I don’t have kids myself, but if I ever had a daughter, I’d be inclined to continue it.
My father’s middle name is Michael, and so are mine and my brother’s. No great family tradition at work (we’re Jews), just that my mom liked the name.
In Russian and Ukrainian culture it is beyond customary to give all children their father’s first name (or some derivative thereof) as a middle name. If this is not done, there would be whispering about who the father really was.
Ivan Goodenuv’s children would all have names like Svetlana Ivana Goodenuv and Pavel Ivan Goodenuv.
I miswrote a bit. She only has sisters and he only has brothers. So they decided if they had a girl it would be her middle name, and if it was a boy, he would get his fathers’.
My middle name is my grandmother’s maiden name. My oldest son is burdened with the same. I always hated it until I started doing genealogy research and found out more about the family.
Also, don’t give any boy the middle name “Wayne”: guys with that middle name always seem to end up criminals.
Are they Chinese or Korean? A Korean friend of mine in college asked if my sister and I had the same middle name, and was rather surprised that we don’t. There’s a tradition of generation names in Chinese and Korean culture, which is very close to this.
No they’re both white, she said her father was Irish, but I don’t know about him.
I guess the result is that it’s tradition in some cultures, but mostly it’s usually just a family tradition.
Or lacking a certain appendage.
A Scottish family I know has the tradition of giving all their children their mother’s family name as a middle, or penultimate name. E.g. if the family name was Browne, and the mother’s family name was Greene, the children would be called Violet Elizabeth Greene Browne, John Ross Greene Browne, etc.
Almost of the men (and one of the women) in my family have the same middle name.
My four brothers and I all have the same middle name as my father, which is the name of one of his uncles. We’re not religious, southern, Russian, Korean, Irish, or anything else. I have no idea why my parents did that, but it ended when my oldest brother had kids. Now there’s 5 grandchildren, and none of them have that middle name. Can you feel the love?
In my ex-husband’s family the oldest son was always named Albert. It was the middle name that changed from generation to generation. So my husband called his older brother Mark, although that was his middle name, to distinguish his brother from the father and the grandfather.
The author of the “Great Brain” series, John D. Fitzgerald had the middle name Dennis, as did all his brothers and his male children, and for several generations before them. There was a family story as to the reason.
I’ve alway’s wondered what Russian women do when they give birth out of wedlock and either don’t know who the father is or don’t want to acknowledge him. 
Does she just make a patronymic or transform her own name into a matronymic?
Not so. But close.
The standard in Russian naming is that the name which occurs between the baptismal (first) and family (last) names is not a “middle name” in our sense of the word but a patronymic, occurring in legitimate births with the same sense of absoluteness with which traditionally the child of a married couple received the surname of the father (and adopted by the mother) in English-speaking nations.
Specificially, Ivan Goodenuv’s son would be Pavel Ivanovich Goodenuv (Paul Goodenuv, son of Ivan Goodenuv) and the daughter would be Svetlana Ivanovna Goodenuva (Svetlana Goodenuva, daughter of Ivan Goodenuv; note the feminine ending on the surname).
Think of John bar Zebedee in the Bible; they had no choice in his cognominal appelation. Because he was the sone of Zebedee, he got “bar Zebedee” for a patronymic. Same principle.