What’s in a name?
Bringing newly named Jane home from the hospital.
My children’s names all sound like they either came straight out of Jane Austen’s England or from the wilds of the American West. I’m fairly “old school” in most things, so I guess it makes sense that my kids’ names are from bygone days as well.
A reader, Beverly, reached out a few months ago with a suggestion that I write about how and when Logan and I named our kids.
“When I name a pup (which I’ve had many!) it’s after I see their personalities,” Beverly wrote. “I assume you can’t wait that long to name a child.”
Beverly, you’d be surprised. While we usually had our list of names whittled down to one or two contenders by the time each of our babies was born, we always waited to name them until we’d been together at least a few hours. Sometimes, we waited much longer.
Little Henry came into the world on a Tuesday night, and by Saturday, we still hadn’t given him a name. We waffled between Henry and Peter and for some reason just couldn’t decide. Finally, we realized the situation was getting ridiculous, so we did what any respectable set of parents would do and drove our family to a McDonald’s parking lot, where we told the children that no one was going inside until we had voted on and picked a name for this kid. Minutes later, we had a name and a table full of Happy Meals and happy kids. Mission accomplished.
Choosing Hyrum’s name was also a bit of a struggle, because by kid number six, we’d used up a lot of the names we’d ever considered. Shortly after Hyrum was born, we decided to name him Oliver. We even have a certificate from his hearing screening in the hospital that sports the name “Oliver Ditto.” But when it came time to fill out his birth certificate paperwork right before leaving the hospital, the name “Oliver” just didn’t feel right.
So we pulled out our phones and started looking up names that were popular in the 1800s. Not too far down the list we found “Hyrum,” which is a name familiar to us but one we had never considered.
“I like it,” I said.
“Yeah, it sounds like a lumberjack,” Logan agreed. We wrote it down on the paperwork and walked out of the hospital, little Hyrum the Lumberjack in tow.
Lucy’s name came a little more easily, although it was also between two names down to the wire. My whole pregnancy, I had been gunning for Elinor, named after Elinor Dashwood in Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility.” But Logan was not on board, not yet having come around to seeing the value in naming your children after 19th century socialites and lumberjacks.
Once she was born, we quickly compromised on the name Lucy, and wouldn’t you know it, when we casually flipped on the TV set in the hospital shortly before leaving for home, a rerun of “I Love Lucy” was on. I think we chose wisely.
Jane is named after another Jane Austen character, Jane Bennet, the most beautiful of all the Bennet sisters in “Pride and Prejudice.” While our fiery and dramatic Jane didn’t inherit Jane Bennet’s docile disposition, she is definitely lovely and good-hearted, just like her name-sake.
To name our third son, Emmett, we put down the Jane Austen novels and instead picked up the Social Security Administration’s online list of most popular names. Did you know that you can search each decade, all the way back to the 1880s, to see the 200 most popular boy and girl names for each time period? It’s a treasure trove of old-school names, and once we came across the name Emmett, we were sold.
George’s name was perhaps our easiest one to come up with. When he was born, his great-great grandfather George was still alive at 104 years old. It was a no-brainer to name our first son after this wonderful man. People would see baby George, and when we told them his name, they would say, “That’s a big name for such a little baby!”
But George has always been an old soul, sincere and deep to a degree not often found in other kids his age. For example, one day when he was about 4 years old, he quietly got up from dinner and went outside. I followed him, trying to figure out what he was up to. I found him sitting on our front porch, introspectively watching our neighbor’s sprinklers go back and forth across their lawn.
Sometimes picking your kids’ names is a challenge. And sometimes, the name picks them.