why did you choose dcs middle names?

Our DS has two middle names, after two of his great-grandfathers. I like to think they'll remind him of his very mixed European heritage, since both me and DH are only half English.

DD1 has my maternal nan's name as a middle name - my nan was there when she was born and cut the cord as DH didn't get there in time

DS has my paternal grandad's middle name (would have been DD1's if she had been a boy) and DS was born on my grandad's birthday

DD2 has two middle names which are my mum and MIL's middle names

i follow the spanish tradition of giving the children the their mothers sir name as their middle name.

Blinkin heck,

whats with all this honoring the dead !

my brother hates his middle name .. after some dead old person he never knew.

My dd was born on 8 July 2006. A good friend of mine died on 7/7, a year and a day earlier (she was on the bus ) and I had considered giving dd her name as a middle name, but my aunt died shortly before dd was born, and I decided to use her name instead. Now I wish I'd used both - it would have been lovely to remember my friend as well as my aunt in dd's name.

We gave DS DP's Dad's name, so as to honour his Grandfather who died many years ago.

Also, I wanted DS to have a traditional type name which gives him another choice if he doesn't like the beautiful but really quite unusual first name we gave him.

thing is its the name THEY have to live with not a vehicle for you remember dead people your children will never know.

My DS's middle name was my maiden name, and since i use my maiden name along with my husbands surname (like maiden-married) i thought it would be nice for him to have my name too, plus we weren't married when he was born, so it was nice he took my name along with his dad's!! :)

I think that's a bit of an odd comment tbh (and quite mean actually)

I think it's lovely to have meaning behind your name. When DS is older we will tell him about his Granddad, who was a good man, and I hope their shared name might help him feels an affinity with him.

Sorry I should have said, that was a response to PaWithABra

how does having the name of someone you have never met create an affinity?

My brother's middle name is our grandfathers dead twins name.

But he never met him, he means nothing to my brother its just an old fashioned name labeling him with other peoples grief.

I think its very unfair.

all of my DCs middle names are names from various members of the family, except DC3 who got one of his middle names because I liked it (and I needed to make up the numbers so it would be the same as the others)

My dd loves that she is named after two of her great-grandmothers. Mind you we'd not have done it if we didn't actually like the names. Nothing to do with grief for us, dh just liked the idea of using his nan's name, and it sounded good with my grandmothers name so that's what we chose.

ds is named after the greatest king of England, and he likes that too. His middle name was just one we liked that sounded right together.

one from each side of the family- seems to be a bit of a tradition in my family

to us, being part of a family is not irrelevant or uninteresting, especially as dcs have dual nationalities; and using middle names from dead relatives also results in them sharing names with cousins who have been named after the same relative- it's something that ties us together

it's not about labelling someone with somebody else's grief: dd has the name of the grandmother whose songs I used to sing when she was little, whose jokes we still tell in the family, whose cake recipes I get out for Christmas: it's about happy memories

not to mention that a lot of the names born by our grandparents' generation are very fashionable now- far better than naming them after living aunts and uncles, whose names would be hopelessly out of fashion