My understanding is that this is an Ashkenazic (spelling wrong!) tradition. I got named the same way - my paternal grandfather, Samuel, died when my father was young, so that’s my Hebrew name, and my English name starts with S. Both my eldest cousins names start with S also. My oldest daughter was named after my other grandfather (same first letter, not same name!) and my youngest after my mother who died just before she was born. Since my brother and I have no middle names, my wife picked them.
Her name, which is unique in my knowledge, gets passed to every other generation. It becomes a middle name when it is skipped, so my older daughter has her name as a middle name. My younger one has her maiden name as a middle name.
I like the first letter tradition, since it cuts down the search space.
I was all set to be “Sarah” - my dad’s pick. A couple of months before I was to be born, a woman moved into our neighborhood and captivated my mom. Her name was Leah. So, Mom vetoed Dad and I was Leah Ellen at birth. Ellen is a family middle name going back 6 or 7 generations.
Oddly enough, with me being a “Leah”, all three of us kids have biblical names (Joshua & Matthew are my older brothers).
I was named after my maternal grandfather, Miller. That was his last name, and I like it. When I was named it, it wasn’t trendy, but seems to be now. There were only Bob’s, Jim’s, and Mikes in my neighborhood.
My parents were expecting a boy (with Patrick Michael picked out for naming), so they got a helluva shock with me. Per family tradition, I should have been Katherina or Margaret, after my maternal grandmother (my mom is named after her, she was named after her mother who was named after…back 50 generations or something), but my paternal grandmother’s names were hideous (not to mention that she’s a bitch on wheels that they preferred not to memorialize), so rather than cause yet another fued by skipping her, they thought fast and the two names they liked best were Sarah and Wendy. Sarah was too silibant with our last name, so Wendy it was. Mom also likes to claim that I “looked more like” a Wendy than a Sarah, but I have no idea what that means and she’s never been able to explain it satisfactorily.
They also told me when I was a kid that they named me after the Beach Boys song. That might be where they got it - I thought it was pretty cool when I was 5, and have recently discovered that it came out about 4 years before I was born, so rather than ask, I’ve chosen to keep my illusions.
Our dirty little family secret is that my middle name, Kay, is intended to be a diminuative of Katherina.
My father was a self educated man. He left school while still in elementary school so he could help his family through the depression. Besides the basic readin’ writin’ and 'rithmatic he taught himself, calculus, Latin, French and a number of business skills.
He named me Terrance after the Roman poet Terence and Verne after Jules Verne, two of his favorite writers.
My name is Jennifer. My parents chose it because they thought it would sound good in casual contexts as well as “in a corporate boardroom”.
I have never in my life gone by my full name (always Jen or, for a very few people, Jenny). And I foiled their plans for my future career in business by being all academic instead. Muhahahahahaha–
Ahem.
I’ve always been bothered by the extreme commonality of my name, and while I don’t think it’s ugly, I also don’t think it’s any great shakes. So if I have children, they’ll get nice-sounding names that are traditional but not ridiculously overused.