Old fashioned names - Page 2

[philomom]

Originally Posted by Twinklefae

My name is Sarah - it was a top 10 for FORTY years.

Everyone in the world is named Sarah. Drives me crazy.

I love old fashioned girls' names, but don't find that there are enough old-fashioned boys names, so went with something more unique.

My 16 year old dd had nine sarah's in her preschool classes. They had to be called by their surnames. Imagine being three and half and having to answer to your surname all the time. Poor things.

[MaerynPearl]

Originally Posted by TnMsMama

We decided to name our daughter after John Wayne (my DBF is obsessed - we have a full size JW cut out in our room watching over our bed) and his real name is Marion Morrison. We were going to spell Marion "Maerian" but after I had to spell it 3 or 4 times for people, we gave up and went with Marian. After alllllll that, I was going through some papers and found out my grandmother's sister was named Marian. How cool is that??

We were considering Maeryan... (mixture of Mae... the name Im most well known as... and Ryan... my DHs name, cheesy right?) but after people kept pronouncing it Mary-Anne we just dropped the A and now its Maeryn (May-Rin)

We just call her Mae though.

[bluebirdmama]

My theory is that it goes in cycles because people wanting to be different try to avoid the current popular names but are often nervous of anything really out there so they go back to less used, older names and it goes round and round.

I definitely have noticed a resurgence of the old names like Charlotte, Hannah, Ella, Emma, Ava, Georgina etc. for girls.

The truth is that for boys there has been very little variation in the top ten for like 100 years...it's all John, Michael, David, Matthew etc. Right? But even for boys, how many Jacks have you met in the last 5 years? Definitely a trend to go with some of the more interesting old names.

I do know one baby named Arthur and another named Walter...both of which are not popular right now, but are definitely old fashioned.

[dmpmercury]

Thanks everyone. Both the boy name (Everett)and girl name (Cora) that are top choices right now are going up in popularity quite a bit at the moment. I usually don't like names that are trending upward so much but getting my dh to agree to a name is hard. He rejects everything. I do really like the names. I think and hope they will stay out of the top 100 to 200 but who knows. I been seeing Cora a lot especially on this site. My kids have classics that are less common (Delia) or stable (Theodore). I tried to go for that again but they were all rejected by dh, names of relatives we don't like or to similar sounding to my current kids names.

There are a lot of good old fashioned names that are not being used very much. I wonder if they will be used more eventually too. It probably does go in cycles. It hard to predict names sometimes. I think online has a part with certain names popularity nowadays. You never know when a tv show or movie will pull a name out of obsurity and turn it into one of the most popular name. Certain old fashioned names have been going up a lot especially since 2006 or the early 2000s. I won't think of my name picks as trendy even though those names are in a trend right now with other names. They are classics that have been around for a long time and never stopped being used completely. At least thats what I tell myself. Hopefully the trend will die down a bit.

[secondimpression]

I just want to point out that it's incredibly difficult to know just how popular a name is going to be in a given year, especially if you have a baby early in the year! My DS is a Xander which while not uncommon, wasn't crazy popular when we named him. By the end of his birth year, there were little Xanders everywhere

Oh...and I'm an Emily born a couple of years before it hit #1 on the girl charts and stayed there. My mom thought she was giving me a good, old-fashioned name that would never identify me with a particular generation. She never could've known that Emily was about to go through one of those spells that Mary and Sarah also go through every few decades . I survived though

[TheDivineMrsM]

Originally Posted by TnMsMama

I like old fashioned names, I think they come around and around again for a reason. Like Chanel - quality lasts. I really don't like the made up names that scream "my parents were trying to be different!"

ITA. Our DD is going to probably be Abigail Hope. DH and I both like old-fashioned names (though I prefer the term "classic.") When I got my BFP, I immediately went through my family tree in search of names. I prefer a classic name that's going to honor a relative instead of something hip with a funky spelling and no real meaning.

But to each their own.