Thoughts on choosing a baby name

Our third child has finally arrived

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I’m going to keep this week’s post short because our third child has finally arrived. She¹ was born around 3:30 pm on March 1, eight days after her due date. Here she is:

In the lead up to the baby’s birth, one of the things we most contemplated was what to name her. That’s normal, but in our case and for our first two kids it wasn’t much of a struggle. We named our oldest after my grandma, who had both a very cool name and who was also a business woman and a bit of a bon vivant. After the name occurred to us, it was an obvious choice. Our son has my first and last names — and because I’m named after my dad, he also gets the Roman numeral “III,” which I think is cool — and his middle name comes from my father-in-law.

But we weren’t sure what to do with our third kid.

While contemplating this, I recalled a series of my ancestors. The first person in this series was born in Wales in 1745. His name was Robert Roberts. His oldest son, born in 1775, was also Robert Roberts. Then that son began a new tradition: He named his oldest son (born 1814) David Robert Roberts, and with each generation they flipped the first and middle names. So, Robert David Roberts. Then David Robert Roberts. This continued until 1898, when they dropped the double “Roberts” as a middle name but still went with David Llewellyn Roberts².

David Llewellyn Roberts was my great grandfather through my maternal grandma, and I don’t have any information on what that branch of the family is up to these days. But my family tree does show that his oldest son (my great uncle) was David Richard Roberts. And the last vestiges of the tradition then appear to have died with him in 1986³.

I know this is a lot of “Davids” and “Roberts,” but the point is simply this: This family kept up a fairly strict naming tradition that spanned at least 241 years. That’s an incredible run!

I know some people aren’t a fan of this kind of thing and to each their own. But I’ve always liked having my dad’s name. I’ve written repeatedly about inheriting financial resources, a social or professional network, a good location, or other things. Inheriting a name is a harder thing to quantify. But speaking from personal experience I can say it does have value. In my most formative years, it molded my sense of self and helped me see myself as one of many.

I know this is arbitrary, but especially as a kid (and also still to some degree as an adult) that arbitrariness didn’t really matter. For example, I happened to be born on George Washington’s birthday. It’s a random coincidence, but as a kid that always made me feel connected to George Washington. Silly as it may sound, it made me want to live up to the version of George Washington I learned about in school. Carrying someone else’s name is sort of like that, but much more so.

When I think about all those David Roberts and Robert Roberts, it also occurs to me that the naming tradition helps maintain a sense of group identity. The fourth or fifth generation in this tradition wouldn’t have personally known those who started it. But they would have necessarily known about them⁴. They probably would have understood that they were part of the same family. Or, the same people. I’ve mentioned before that I’d like to see myself as one chapter in a story that began before me and will continue after, and names strike me as a simple but powerful way to convey that concept.

On the other hand I don’t want to be too rigid here, and in the end we decided to introduce a new name to the family for our latest kid: Violet. But we also gave our new daughter the middle name “Ann.” That’s the same middle name as her mother, who was in turn named after a pioneer ancestor who is responsible for bringing the extended clan to the American West.

Violet is visible on the left. My other daughter and I are doing what she describes as her “new smile.”

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now because the baby is crying as I write this.

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Headlines to read this week:

Find More Ways to Be an Outsider

“However, with all due respect to Plato, outsiders can actually do very well. True, they generally suffer somewhat in the short term after a move. For example, one recent study showed that international college students rated their life satisfaction about 4 percent lower at the end of their first semester than at the beginning of the term. But a mountain of evidence shows that in the long run, being an outsider predicts well-being and emotional strength; it may even protect against depression.”

1. I previously wrote that we were having a boy. That was based on a test the doctors did, but it turned out they input the results of that test into the computer incorrectly and we had a girl. We learned the baby was a girl a while ago, though, so it wasn’t a surprise in the delivery room.

2. As it was explained to me, the first-name-middle-name back and forth thing ended because the wife who married into the family in 1893 — and whose name was Tryphena of all things — wouldn’t have it. I’ve often contemplated what it would be like to marry into a family and then insist that a 150 year old tradition end with you. But more interestingly, it strikes me as notable that this moment took place at the same time that extended family structures were crumbling and individualism was on the rise. It’s fascinating to ponder the possibility that the family naming tradition was a victim of the massive social and economic shifts of the Victorian age.

3. The family tree indicates that David Richard Roberts had two daughters, both of whom are now deceased. It also indicates that both of them died relatively young, and neither had any children listed in the records — though I always take these records with a grain of salt. However, remnants of the tradition do still exist to this day and I have multiple family members named “David” or “Robert” who are not only still alive but who are in some cases significantly younger than me — meaning some echo of the original tradition may be around even into the 22nd century.

4. It’s also fascinating that this tradition ultimately continued for seven generations. Since writing about the seven generation concept a few months ago I’ve learned of other examples in difference cultures that similarly focus on maintaining a family identity over roughly the same span of time. For example, in Kazakh culture there’s a tradition known as Jety-ata which requires people to know there ancestry up to seven generations. It’s interesting that this idea pops up in different cultures, periods and locations — as well as organically as is apparent when looking at the duration of traditions in my own family tree.