3 children with my DDs name!

[Peasize]

My DD has what I would consider an underused name. It’s well known but not used for many children her age. I’m a bit of a name freak and checked all the stats for the years before her birth and subsequent years after and it is hardly used. Around 150-200 born a year roughly and well above top 200-300 names a year but there’s 3 with her name in a tiny rural nursery. I realise that everyone is looking for less popular/underused names now and people may say it’s obviously not as unusual as I thought but the stats do show it is quite underused so it really strikes me as being crazy that there are 3. Has anyone had similar? Seems like there’s little pockets of popular names in areas maybe.

Our DC is a Thom - mostly because there were a lot at nursery in the US in early 00s. Oddly not so many Thomas’s in his UK cohort. It’s an enormous sixth form college of 1200 per year and he only knows 3 others. He knows 5 Will’s and 6 Sam’s

I'm in America. I grew up in a small town. For High School we went to a school that was for kids from 3 small towns. My grade (Year) had about 100 kids (this is small for an American High School). In my grade there were 5 girls (including me) with a name that was never terribly popular. 4 were from my small town, and 1 from the small town next to us. In all my years at school there was never another kid with this name outside the 5 of us in the same grade. I've always thought it was such a weird fluke.

You can’t predict how these things will work out. My ds has a name which has been top 10 forever, and no.1 for a good chunk of his childhood, dd has a top 50 name. Neither of them have been in school with a child with the same name, not a single one (although admittedly they go to tiny secondary schools!).

my friend told me there were two girls in her daughters class both named Unique 😂

Names can also suddenly change in popularity. I had an old fashioned name for my generation, but then the name took off and wasn't out of the top 10 for about 2 decades. Now more unusual again. Can't predict that.

Or Hetty?

My son is now grown up, but when he was about 4 we met another kid who not only had the same (unusual) name but had been born on the same day in the same hospital 😂

My son is Andrew and there isn't another one in his school. All the Andrew's I know are over thirty years old.
My daughter has a foreign name so no namesakes but people don't know how to pronounce it. She herself is happy with her name.

i worked in a nursery 10 years ago and had 3 Audreys at once. My 22 year old dd was very nearly Ella- I had never heard of one. Oddly, a close friend also had an Ella just before she was due so we didn’t use it. In her school year there were about 5 Ella’s!
My 16 year old DD had a name that was very unusual at the time- not even in the top 500. Now I hear it everywhere.
Its just how it is sometimes

Around 150-200 born a year roughly

That is quite a lot actually, especially if a lot of them live near you

My dc is used about 30 times per year and we've not yet met anyone else their age with the name

I meet an Audrey, Penelope and Bonnie today on the way to the vets ( all sisters) I love the name Audrey

People love to talk baby names and parents love a slightly but not too unusual name.

Imagine someone names their DD Audrey. They tell the neighbour who goes to work where a colleague is about to go onto maternity. 'Oh my neighbour had a girl, called her Audrey. It's quite nice'.

So colleague decides she likes it and her baby is named Audrey too. They put a birth announcement in the local paper. Audrey who is about to become a grandma sees it and shows her daughter 'would never have believed it but here's a baby Audrey. Must be coming back in fashion.' Her daughter was thinking Audrey would be her baby's middle name after her mum but, if it's coming back in, perhaps she will name her Audrey. It would make her mum so happy.

And then there's a bubble of three local Audreys.

It's funny. My kids have what some would consider boring, classic names. There's no others in their year groups at nursery or school.

re. @MolkosTeenageAngst , onn page 3
For example, a lot of Welsh baby names don’t make the top 100 but will be far from unique if used within Wales, a baby Bethan, Nia or Aled may go to school with several others if living in Wales but if living in Yorkshire may never meet another.
Bethan, Nia and Aled in Wales will probably be the only one in their class, because those names were used for their parents or grandparents age groups.

Haha, completely agree, I am Welsh and those were the peers I went to school with but don’t live there now so not really sure what the current babies are being called. I thought I had written ‘(or whatever the current generation of babies in Wales are being named)’ in parenthesis in my post but realise I didn’t! But I think my point still stands regardless of whether Bethan, Nia and Aled or Mabli, Efa, Idris and Emrys (names some of my friends have used recently, not sure if they’re more in line with current trends) are currently being used? My point was popular baby names are often regionally popular rather than nationally so, the Welsh baby names weren’t massively relevant.

Oh and my favourite boy's name at the time was Noah but I thought it would be unfair and he'd get bullied for it. Now you can't move for mini Noahs...

why on earth would someone get bullied for being called Noah?

My friends granddaughter is called Betsy - not a nn -it's her full name. I have only met elderly people with that name until recently when I went to a charity fundraiser and there were 3 little girls called Betsy .

@MolkosTeenageAngst .you're on the right lines with those names.
The ones on the 'welsh name' threads are like suggesting names like Sarah, Susan, Darren, Ian, Mark, Julie, Karen and Emma for an english baby.

Oh and my favourite boy's name at the time was Noah but I thought it would be unfair and he'd get bullied for it.

Unfair? Getting bullied? Am I missing some rude association with Noah?

I get that (although I do have a Welsh friend in Wales who has named her baby born this year Bethan), I knew they weren’t necessarilly popular names now I was just trying to point out that baby name statistics for England and Wales as a whole won’t necessarilly take into account how popular names are regionally and that Welsh baby names, for example, rarely make the top 100 but won’t necessarilly be unusual in Wales. I wasn’t specifically trying to give an example of popular current welsh names because that wasn’t the point of the thread or my post.

@redlavender , it's one of those names that was considered 'out there' by parents wanting a different/unique name for their child.
They worried that it was too unusual, too linked to the Bible.

Little Noah went to nursery with several other Noahs

It experienced something similar with name spellings. When I was growing up I went to school with about five Hollies, all spelt ‘Hollie’. They were spread across about three year groups.

It wasn’t until I left school and went to uni and into the world of work that I realised that the vast majority are spelled ‘Holly’. In fact, I’ve never met another spelled Hollie, apart from those from my school. Every Holly I encounter now is spelled Holly. I’m fascinated!

I think Audrey is a really pretty name! I'd consider it for my own daughter (currently pregnant).

But it does have some indicators of a rising popularity name...

Revival of "grandma" name
Starts with A ("pretty" letter) and ends with vowel sound / ey
Positive associations (Audrey Hepburn?)
Not overly frilly

Op picked a name like Betty that's well known but unused. Hardly likely to be a unique name is it? People are allowed to like something other than Oliver and Olivia!!

We didn't pick Noah because it was so popular, absolutely our favourite but was like come on,they're will be a class of them....

A friend from work had one, but possibly wouldn't if we'd had it. A friend of a friend has one. That's it. None in school at all or Beavers / Cubs