What do you think your parents were/were not thinking when they chose your names?

[DrMadelineMaxwell]

Mine were thinking...

Ooo that's a nice unusual name from a book I read that I've never seen before (Dad).

Let's go with a Welsh spelling for the middle name.

They were not thinking...

Noone will know how to spell either names and they will have to be spelled out every time. Tedious.

We live in Wales but not in a Welsh area and don't speak Welsh.

I have no idea what they were thinking. They chose a really shit name. If there is a thread about terrible names that deserve to be relegated to the dustbin of history, my name will come up very quickly and repeatedly. It is a dreadful name. It’s got nothing going for it whatsoever.

...bam bam bam? Sorry!!

Of Egyptian Royalty.

My dad had a crush on Michaela Strachan…

My mum was stumped with the name for my sister until the cleaner mentioned that her granddaughter had just be born and was called Melissa.

So mum used that.

No idea what they were thinking but they let 4 year old brother choose my name. He chose the name of a little girl who lived in a nearby street. No middle name ( no imagination any of them)
When my mother was pregnant with next child I can remember them debating names at the dinner table. My mother said definitely A for a girl, it’s always been my favourite girl’s name. Baby was a boy but I was told how A was her favourite girls name for years.

@Razzlefrazzle “I endured endless flack from a succession of English teachers who were convinced I couldn't spell my own name” - how annoying! I wish teachers wouldn’t do this.

DB1 - Infamous royalty of similar age
DB2 - after St of church where DDad had once lived, abroad.*
Me - literary character from a book both my DPs collected different editions of before they met (DDad - translations, DM - illustrators)
DSis - Z name as she was definitely the last, but not the really unusual Z name the neighbours's child had, a really common Z name that about 10% of the girls in her school year had.

• I need to count myself lucky here, because the boys name I would have had was after the church what DDad grew up and I could have been Ignatius. Yey for XX chromosomes.

My first name is after someone Mum met on holiday. It's a foreign spelling of a name that was relatively common in the UK about 20-30 years before I was born. It has 3 syllables but no obvious nickname possibilities. Middle name after my grandmother. Mum was apparently thinking 'Oh, that's a classic but not often used name so it won't date like all these fashionable names but the unusual spelling will make it seem modern and different.' Dad was thinking 'Thank God she's given up on the idea of calling her something from Shakespeare'. Neither considered that I would be a small child with 2 old lady names, no choice of using a nickname instead and the constant PITA of having to correct the spelling of my first name. Or that in years to come technology would mean that I often worked with people for ages before meeting them face to face and would constantly be told that I am much younger than they had imagined (which is a nice way of saying they all assumed from my name that I'd be ready for retirement)

My first name is a combination of my parents names. It has a masculine and feminine version which seems not to exist now as everyone just says the male version. Like.. that's not my name, the clue is in the email...
imagine Samantha but people keep saying Samuel.. Samantha still exists, and I'm right here

My middle name is a Jewish spelling which again nobody can pronounce, or spell

My mother decided to call me after King henry v111 wives. The ones that had identical names.
So that's nice...

Apparently, she was watching the film/ series when pregnant with me

When they were naming my sister my mum thought "I know we'll give you the name of my sister and two already existing cousins" and for me it was "I've already put so much effort into naming your sister I'll just give you the same name as me even though only old ladies are ever called this".

@Topseyt123 and @Catinthesun , same here.
Not only is my middle name my known as name but it's unusual, and my first name really common. I've never used or been known by my first name so when someone asks for Sarah, I don't realise they mean me.

My first name was the first name in the baby name book. As they were leaving the hospital they saw that the ward I was born on was a lovely name (classic Welsh name that had about 6 in each class) so changed it to that.

I'm named after my dad, I have the feminine form of his name. Middle name is my mother's. It's a tradition in my dad's family to have all the kids names start with the same letter and to be Gaelic names, so they kept that going with me and my sister. My kids have Gaelic names but I didn't keep with the first letter tradition.

My big sis - let's give her a name with only 3 letters that everyone can spell

Me- let's give her a slightly unusual name that's often used in English with the French spelling instead of the English and then she'll never be able to buy anything in gift stores with her name on, she'll spend her whole life telling people how to spell it and they will always start writing J when she tells them her name before she gets a chance to spell it out so they have to cross it out and put a G (this has got slightly better since computers became commonplace) and she will reach her 50s without meeting more than one person who spells their name the same way (I still remember that shop assistant in WH Smith in Plymouth who was baffled by my greeting her like a long lost family member when I spotted 'my' name on her name badge) and when she emigrates no one will have heard of it all and people will forever be pronouncing the final letter instead of it being silent 🙄

All the suggestions including the one I have were French. My DF only liked the one I had and I've been spelling it to everyone ever since. Not that I use it as I use my nickname.

There was alot of thought. And arguing.

My middle name was kind of after one of my GGMs but it wasnt the same. That is my DM all over.

My DS was named after a character in a book. The name then became quite popular but I still love it and it really suits him.

I'm not sure they were thinking - they gave me a name that I have to constantly correct people on how to spell and pronnounce. They gave me my great grandmother's name as my middle name. (cousin has the shortened, less formal version as her first name)

"Well we were going to call her Danielle, but since we have been calling the bump Charlie all the way through and she has turned out to be a girl, we had better call her Charlotte so we can carry on doing that. And let's give her the middle name that 60 per cent of her peers will have."

Mine were thinking:

• We can't call her the name we were thinking of because my brother's just called his daughter that
• This is a nice name that everyone else is using, let's use that!

They were not thinking:

• Giving her the same initial as her mother might cause some confusion down the line
• She will always be one of many with that name - I even had someone with the same first and middle name as me in my class at secondary school

@RaRaRaspoutine @JurrasicCazza I don't mind being a Sweet Caroline 🤷🏽‍♀️ and I don't need a golden calculator either....

My first name is associated with a time of ye

Oops, managed to press post too soon!
my name is associated with a time of year but isn’t when I was born.
they also managed to give me and my sister the same middle name as they forget they’d already used it 🙄

Not my name but my middle name

dad had fallen in love with the name after watching tv and an old lady character had it and he thought that if he ever had a dd,he’d name her after the character

he met and married my mother

she fell pregnant and they agreed I’d be ‘character name’ then ‘name they had chosen but not named after anyone’

i came out,female,and my mother ‘accidentally’ swapped the names around (thank fuck-my middle name is awful)

Dad got over it,they came out of hospital and my grandad suddenly told them he had an ‘aunt first name’ (that was meant to be the middle name)

my mother told him not to tell her mother and that was the end of that

They were debating whether to use a modern sounding French form of a name (mum) or an older English form which was the name of an ancestor from the 1700s (dad).

One of my aunts stepped in with one of the most pious, frumpy names ever, and they went with that for the BC, but used the Irish version thereafter, thankfully. I've always wished dad had won.