My grandma (Slovak immigrant) was Mary and her oldest daughter was Marie. I never thought my aunt was named for her mom but I’ve heard several of grandma’s relatives refer to HER as “Marie” so I guess my aunt was named for her?
I went to school with a girl who had the same name as her mom. Never referred to her as Jr. she woulda been born in like 1976.
My dad is a Jr and my brother is a III. Grandpa’s sister’s son and grandson are Jr and III as well.
My boyfriend’s dad gave his twin sons his name as their middle names. His grandparents named their FIFTH son Paul Jr. Son goes by Wally.
I heard a rumor that your father was actually named El-jor. Any truth to that?
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Another woman named for her mother: Henrietta Swan Leavitt. She’s known for noticing a relationship between the absolute brightness of a certain type of variable star and its rate of pulsation. This is an important discovery. Without it, the science of cosmology would not exist, at least as we know it.
The only woman I can think of off the top of my head was a woman I worked with many years ago, whom I found out a while back is now deceased, whose name was Margaret Ann, and had always gone by Margaret. She named one of her daughters after herself, and this daughter was always called Peggy.
We have a few direct name chains in my immediate family (defined as “people whose birthdays I know”), which I never really thought of as Southern (which we are) or narcissistic (which I can’t deny some of us are). Equivalents of our first and middle names:
Kelly Purcell (male, went by “K.P.”, born ~1895) → Jack Kelly → Jack Kelly Jr. (“Jake”) → Jack Kelly III (“Kelly”)
Louise Rose (born ~1925) → Louise Catherine (“Katie”)
Rebekah Joy (born ~1975) → Melissa Rebekah
Katrina June (born ~1985) → Shaylee June
One of my female coworkers has a homophonic daughter (-rry to -ri).
Over 40 years ago I know a mother and daughter pair who had the same name and the daughter was explicitly a “junior”. To the extent it said so on the daughter’s birth certificate.
My daughter has my name as her middle name - my husband’s suggestion. As far as I know, there’s only one junior in my family - Uncle Joe (now deceased) and my cousin Joe (now in his 70s.) No women named for their mothers, but there’s one named for her grandmother. Among my friends over the years, I can’t think of any women named for their mothers.
I can assure you that both Gaelic and Welsh are real languages spoken by real people, and when English speakers make fun of other people’s languages as “gibberish,” particularly minority languages and languages of people they’ve colonized, it’s the linguistic equivalent of “punching down.” Not at all cool.
My husband’s parents chose to put an English name on his birth certificate, but keep the Welsh one off, lest it hold him back due to attitudes like this (he and his sibling have since reclaimed their names by deed poll).
To contribute to the thread, my female cousin is named after our aunt (which means all three names were the same: mother > daughter often involves changing the surname). Personally, I quite like being named after an ancestor but would have been very unhappy to be a junior.
Oh, man, that’s sad. If you don’t mind my asking, what age was this? I’ve heard of teens being declared emancipated to get out from under toxic parents but while they might go to live with someone more sympathetic, weren’t adopted, per se.
15 for the emancipation from the monstrous parents. Official adoption was at 35. Had not even met my future adoptive parents at the time of emancipation.
In terms of narcissism, I think most people think if it as passing on a family name, not naming their child in their image. As mentioned by several people, family names often don’t take the full, formal First/Middle/Last format: it’s more often that a name, or a form of a name, is used in most generations as a first or middle name by one or more children. People like the continuity. It’s not narcissistic any more than passing on a family engagement ring is narcissistic.
I have known some people for whom it was clearly rooted in narcissism, but I think that’s an exception.
My mom and her younger brother were both named after their dad. In this case my grandmother didn’t want a third child and decided naming the second daughter after my grandfather would have to do. When there was another baby 4 years later went with jr anyway.
I have five sisters. Sister #3 has my mom’s first and middle names, tho no junior. Sister #4 has a feminine version of my dad’s name for a first name and a totally made up middle name. The other three sisters and all four of us brothers have non-family names.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman named after their mom or dad other than my sisters.
On my dad’s side I had an aunt named Elizabeth Ann. In reading the family tree this name was passed down from mother to daughter for 5-6 generations. I guess they differentiated each other by being called Beth, Liz, Lizzy, etc… My aunt was known to the family as Ann. She stopped the “tradition” when she didn’t name any of her 3 daughters Elizabeth Ann.
It wasn’t until I was a young teenager when I seen my cousin’s (her daughter) wedding invitation that I realized Ann wasn’t her first name as the invitation said “Ronald and Elizabeth Smith are pleased to announce…” I had to ask my dad who Elizabeth was.
I’ve met lots of men named after their fathers - one of my brothers is named after our Dad, and it’s not at all uncommon in my generation (40s) or above. Doesn’t seem to be common in my daughter’s generation; I can’t think of any at all.
The only female name I’ve known handed down from mother to daughter was my ex mother-in-law and sister, and it went back something like five generations, eldest daughter to eldest daughter. It’s a very unusual name, not easy to pronounce for many non-English speakers and hard even for English speakers, and for the current generation, now aged about 15, they decided to use it as a middle name.
I think it’s kind of a shame TBH, but I’m not the one who had to live with it.
(Don’t try to guess the name - it really is so distinctive it would be like saying “this specific person is who I’m talking about.”)
I do think there’s a difference between giving your kid a family name and giving the kid your own name. It’s one thing to call your kid Robert if his uncle is Robert or his grandfather is John Robert or even if Robert is your middle name; it feels less like honoring family and more about making someone in your image when Robert is also the name of the father. Just my two cents.
Family experience: I have one uncle who named his first son after himself–first, middle, last. I’m fond of my uncle, but he’s definitely the sort who would do something like this in homage to himself.
Also family experience, and this is the weird one: My great-grandmother had a very unusual name. It was traditionally a man’s name which sounds rather silly today, only with a Y replacing one of the vowels: think Mortimyr or Algyrnon. Far as I know it has never before or since been used for a woman (or with that spelling for anybody else). She passed that name down to her daughter, my grandmother. Poor grandmother; she went by her initials or a couple of unrelated nicknames. Anyway, I did not know my great-grandmother well at all–she died when I was 13–but I remember her as imperious and family stories suggest that she was indeed quite narcissistic. Anyway, YMMV.
One of my childhood friends, Ernest, and his sister Rachel each shared a first name with the identical-sex parent. I had a Bonnie as my fifth-grade teacher, and her daughter Bonnie as my high school “Brit Lit” instructor. My brother dubbed a mother and daughter he worked with as “Sue and Sue Jr.” since both were named Susan.
I also have a cousin Paul whose late father was Uncle Paul, but their middle names were different, and I still call the younger Paul “Eric” even though he’s “Paul” to everyone else. Another cousin is Ronald, as is his father, but I’m not sure if young Ron is a “Junior” or not. Both of the houses next door to the one in which I grew up had a father who had passed down his name to his son. Both Johns were known as John, while “big James” went by Jim and “little James” was “Jimmy” to most, but “Butch” to his dad.