Individual families come up with all kinds of weird naming rules. In my family, all first born males have to be named “James” including me but none of us use it as our given name. We are referred to by our middle names since birth and the middle name is the one that counts. It is a Southern thing. My branch of the family is even more specific than that. All first born males have to have a middle name that starts with ‘M’ including me as well.
Everyone else is free to have any name. My daughters aren’t named after anyone on purpose. Theirs were just chosen to be aesthetic and my brothers were partially named in honor of various family members. The oddest is my youngest brother who has a first and middle name that he never uses and was never intended to. He has a designated nickname that he goes by and has since he was born.
It gets irritating when I start a job and have to constantly correct people what my real name is but most people get it eventually. There are also some benefits. If someone calls me and asks for me by my legal first name, that is a blatant sign that they don’t know me so I just hang up. I can also freely sign documents like hotel bills and other contracts for my father without issue because we have the same first name and middle initial and the id to back it up. I don’t abuse that but it helps sometimes.
I have a middle name shared with my mom and her mother. It was my great-grandmother’s first name, slightly modified. I don’t think it goes back any farther than that.
Both my daughters have a shared middle name, which in turn is shared with my wife, and is the maiden name of one of her grandmothers. Don’t know where the tradition comes from, and I think we’re the first generation to do it that way (with shared middle names) in our families. You’d have to ask my wife for the exact reasoning for it, but I remember it as a way of her passing down her and her family’s name. My wife kept her last name after marriage, but the kids have my last name, so having a common middle name reflecting my wife’s family history made some kind of sense (and my wife’s last name is a bit unwieldy as a middle name, but my wife’s middle name, which is also a family name, is much less so and definitely more euphonic.)
My sister and I have variants of the same name for our middle names. I don’t think it’s so much that our parents wanted us to match, as that they just liked the meaning of the name enough to use it twice.
I am a direct descendant of Anne Lucy Howard, who was a member of one of the founding families of New England. A branch of the family went out to Ohio and married a Taft.
Both my brothers and a lot of my nieces and nephews have the middle name of “Howard.” My middle name is Anne.
This was an invention of Fitzgerald. He himself had the middle name Dennis, but his brother Tom, for instance, had the middle name Nielsen, and his other brothers all had different middle names.
We are about as “damn Yankee” as they come, and my family does this. I and my siblings all have the same middle name, which was my father’s middle name. Definitely a “Christian name”, though, and not an attempt to perpetuate a maiden name.
My mother’s family did the thing with the first son getting the same first name and then going by his middle name. There’s something like five to seven generations of that tradition.
My parents gave me the same first name even though I’m a second son of a daughter, and you would have thought my parents were the vilest creatures of the entire planet if you were to just focus on the reaction from great grandma and other relatives.
