Half sibling names

[Kersul]

My DH has two children from a previous marriage. We are planning on starting a family and I wanted some opinions on whether to take his children’s names into consideration when thinking about a name for our DC.

Some of the names that I like have a different style but I do like some names that do match his children's names that end in a y/ie sound.

If it makes any difference my DH is quite a bit older than me so his children are late teens so not a traditional sibling relationship.

Any opinions or personal experience of this would be great.

Unless you mean actually copying the same name (which I have seen done and is a very big no from me!) I think you are fine.

My name goes-ish with my much older half brother's name.

I think it would be odd for my dad to say his two children are called William and Chardonnae-Mai, for example. Or River-Eden and Louise. Our names don't match, but they are both quite traditional names with traditional spelling, although they both have two variants.

I don’t think they need to match, no.

DH’s son has a traditional name and we chose a traditional name for our eldest, the middle name starting with the same initial. Then second child was a boy so I chose a traditional name that started with the same initial as my DSS and to keep the theme going he too had a middle name with the same initial. Then we had another girl and she got a traditional name with the same initial as her elder sister and she too has a surname with the same initial.

DSS was well aware of what we were doing, by making his younger siblings have names which mirrored his own, I hope in some way it helped to make him feel included in his new family and not left out. Especially as there is a 10+ year age gap between him and them.

My DCs half siblings have a different 'style' of name. I'd say it was the Step-Mums influence, but they have a different style to her older dc as well.

I did try to consider how my 2 step sons traditional names and my 2 boys unisex/last name as a first name would all go with the daughter we're expecting. Aswell as thinking about initials, how her name sounds with ours. I don't suppose it really matters at the end of the day as long as you both like the name you choose.

Depends. My step sons have names I strongly dislike (think "edgy" names like Quayden etc) and I like traditional names like Samuel or Alexander. So our kids definitely won't match. If it had been daughters like Audrey and Julie I would've considered maybe a similar sound like Emily.