Who were you named after?
My parents chose Margaret just because they liked the name. My Grandma insisted I was named after her daughter who died of asthma aged eleven. I wasn’t - although, looking at the photos of her Margaret, she was very beautiful - so I didn’t mind!
I should have been Jennifer, but the woman next door had a baby the day before I arrived and named her Jennifer, my Mum didn’t want us to have the same name, so Margaret it was. I really like the name Jennifer.
Only two people on Earth call me Margaret, my SIL and my friend Shaun - both say because it‘s a lovely name. My Dad started calling me Mags when I was a baby so I don’t recognise Margaret as me at all.
I know some people here like to be anonymous so a discussion of names could be limiting, but we’ll see.
I should have been Jennifer, but the woman next door had a baby the day before I arrived and named her Jennifer, my Mum didn’t want us to have the same name, so Margaret it was. I really like the name Jennifer.
Only two people on Earth call me Margaret, my SIL and my friend Shaun - both say because it‘s a lovely name. My Dad started calling me Mags when I was a baby so I don’t recognise Margaret as me at all.
I know some people here like to be anonymous so a discussion of names could be limiting, but we’ll see.

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Then, when I went home from Sunday School full of a David having been told that there was a story about someone with his name in the Bible, Mum told me there was a story attached to my name in a book older than the Bible, so off I went to the library and Homer.
My mother wanted to name me after her father's (my maternal grandfather's) middle name, but as he was something of a black sheep, the rest of the family overruled her.
My confirmation name: Supposed to be that of a saint. A man who lived across the street from us had just died. I was sure he had gone to heaven, and so I chose his name as my confirmation name.
I can’t tell you how much I like this!
However, given that I was born in 1979, that's not what most people assume when they hear the name Margaret. I think my Dad rather regretted it afterwards.
(Not telling you my first name
Not, shall we say, one of the better known saints.
My older brothers had to fight to get approval to use Arthur as their confirmation name. By the time I came around, though, the pastor just let it go. "Oh, it's THAT family again..."
My mother was baptised Gertrude#, and couldn't abide being known as Gert or Gertie#, insisting on Gertrude throughout her life.
So when we were born, Mum and Dad decided the solution was to give us all single-syllable names which couldn't be shortened.
Hence Fawkes~. This name turns out to be something of a penance if you grow up in an industrial town just outside London. And it also turns out (half a century later, and in a port city in the North West) that Fawkes can be transformed to 'Fawko', this gaining an extra syllable after all.
*Not really, but attempting to maintain some anonymity here
# See *
~ See *, but the same applies to my actual given name
As for my kid - my husband's family has a tradition of naming kids after ancestors, so when his father died, I promised we'd name our kid after him. A few years later and we can't name the kid after BOTH grandpas, because then he'd have the exact same name of his paternal grandpa. Instead, I insisted on giving the baby my grandpa's first name as his middle name, as he shared a birthday with both men.
And that is the story of how I named my 3-year-old after the two most stubborn old goats I have ever known. At least it rolls off the tongue when I call him by both names, which is frequent.
My mother came by her name after a cousin on her mother's side who died young. When I went up to uni, one of my first friends - whom I have yet - had the identical name to that long dead girl. Given the geographical proximity, a degree of actual cousinage may be involved, but we never bothered tracing it.
One thing about the name I go by - I do feel it's my real name. I have known female friends who didn't feel they belonged to their names: one even changed hers.
True story. When my eldest SIL was born, her parents were going to name her one way, but her grandmother got ahead of them and registered the birth before they could and so she had the name Margaret.
There are 2 ways of spelling my name: the way my mother wanted it spelt and the way the Registrar spelt it on my birth certificate. If you look at letters/photos etc from my babyhood, my mother has always written my name the way she wanted it spelt; as soon as I started learning to write, I started spelling it the other way, which prevailed at some stage.
MMM
You're called Wheelwright? 😯
My middle name is my mother's first name, as is family tradition. There's actually quite a straightforward procedure for this, but it fails at my sister who should have had either grandmother's first name, but one grandmother did not want her name perpetuated as she had always hated it, and one parent hated their mother so much (for good reason, I may say) that name didn't get used!
I wanted Matthew but my husband said ‘no, he’ll get called Matt and people walk on mats’. 🤔
Surnames as given names are common here. Our son’s middle name was my grandmother’s maiden name and my wife’s great grandmother’s maiden name. When we realized, years before he was born, that the name was on both sides of the family, we decided that’s what we’d name a son.
*Obviously there are surnames that don’t lend themselves to this convention.
And they have their own pieces of music - though Zadok wins the prize there.
I had a good friend who’s name sounded the same as mine, but hers was with a K. We used to take great pleasure in ringing each other - “Hello K***, it’s C***” As she said, I could see the K in front of her name and she could see the C in front of mine!
BTW, if you want to know more about your name's etymology and the frequency of use worldwide, go to Behind the Name,
And I have just double-checked my name. Note from maker of wheels, but maker of wagons. I learned something new today. And the funny thing is, a friend and I did rebuild a wagon a few years ago. It was a Studebaker wagon built in the 1870s, much like "]this one.
I was born towards the end of the war, and at that time there were radio programmes broadcasting greetings to American soldiers stationed in the UK from their loved ones 'back home'
I don't know if any other names had been considered, but when they heard the message that ended "and Sharon sends her love", they fell for the name and that was the decision made. They had no idea who or what this Sharon was, and I used to say that I was probably named after someone's dog!
As a child I loved my unusual name, there were no other Sharons in my school and I was thrilled to find it in the bible. I was 23 before I came across someone who shared my name.
I was less thrilled when it suddenly became popular, not to say common, in the seventies, when the name was heard shouted across supermarkets and playgrounds all over the country - well, certainly all over Essex, where I lived at that time.
That's precisely why I named a little girl in our church with that name--her mother insisted I pick an "American" name for her, and I wanted to give her maximum flexibility. Though I felt a bit guilty when I met her again at age 14 and discovered the family was using the full name at length, every single time...
My grandfather was called Frank. For years, I assumed that his given name was Francis, but having done a lot of research through Ancestry, I've found that every official document calls him Frank. I don't have a birth certificate, unfortunately, but I have military records from his time in the Boer War and from his time in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in WW1. And I have a copy of his Canadian wedding certificate.
The other strange thing is that all his siblings had middle names (and often that's what they were known as, so that Alfred Walter was always known as Wally and Bernard Reginald was known as Reggie) but Frank only ever seems to have had one name.
Reminds me of my real life name, which a visiting Norwegian Lutheran delegation seized upon gladly, in the mistaken belief that they had found a compatriot who had immigrated (most improbably) to St. Louis. Introductions were a little strained once they realized.
My parents came from a tradition where children were named according to an algorithm that connected children's names to relatives.
eldest daughter: named after maternal grandmother
2nd daughter: named after paternal grandmother
3rd daughter: named after eldest sister of mother
4th daughter: named after eldest sister of father
...and so on through the women of the family, descending through the parents' sisters.
eldest son: named after paternal grandfather
2nd son: named after maternal grandfather
3rd son: named after eldest brother of father
4th son: named after eldest brother of mother
... and so on through the men of the family, descending thorough the parents' brothers.
I have 2 sisters and one brother. I could tell you what my next 5 (imaginary) sisters would have been named and what two more brothers would have been called. At that point, we would have run out of grandparents, aunts and uncles, and I don't know how the algorithm would have dealt with that.
I was always intended to be called by that name, but was given my mother's name Mary as my first name because the names sounded better (less staccato) that way round. In fact the same was true of my mother's names: her family always called her Elsie and my father and everyone else always called her Mary.
But having an official first name that differs from my usual name has been a right nuisance, on exam certificates and airline documents etc. so I did eventually drop "Mary" after my mother's death, so now have only my real (ship in a bottle) name.
Yes, indeed.
I have one name from each of my grandfathers, both still very much alive when I was born.
My father wasn't keen on the names he inherited from somewhere in the family tree, so the policy for my generation was that we have names that didn't belong to anyone.
Having twins means you have not only to think of more names but how they will go together - I know of a set who ended up with William and Benedict, promptly shortened to Bill and Ben, and known throughout their schooldays as Flowerpot #1 and #2 😖