Hey Swistle!

We are expecting our first child around Thanksgiving. We are waiting to be surprised by the baby’s sex. We think we have our girl’s name picked out (Lucille “Lucy” Mae or Margot Marie), but we are absolutely stumped on a boy’s name.

We have set a few parameters in choosing our name:
– Baby’s middle name will be Robert, which is Dad’s first name (follows family tradition going back at least 4 generations)
– Our Catholic faith is important to us so we’re looking for something classic and “saintly”
– Baby’s name will be a name used only/primarily for boys
– My wife Claire and her family are very conscious about monograms so something that looks good next to SR (first name initial, last name initial, middle initial) or RS (first name initial, middle initial, last name initial)
– We’re not too excited about names that start with a vowel
– We want a name that will shorten to a cute nickname we can lovingly call him (one of my friends named his first son Eugene, but calls him Egon; I’m looking for similar creativity)

Perhaps these parameters are too restrictive, but it has led to a nice list of names:
Charles/Charlie
Peter/Petey
George/Georgie
Ernest/Ernie
Augustine/Gus
Louis/Lou (honors my wife’s hometown)
Theodore/Teddy
Joseph/Joey
Benjamin/Benji
Douglas/”Doc” (because his first two initials would be DR, ;) – Also would honor great-grandfathers on both sides)
Franklin/Frankie
Frederick/Freddie
Samuel/Sammy

While we have this list, none of them seem to be “the one” We really liked Charlie, but then my parents got a dog a few years ago and named him Charlie (Can we name our son after the family dog?). Peter, Samuel, and Joseph are certainly Catholic, but is it too biblical? Douglas/”Doc” seems really cute, but is it too much of a pun for a name and will it require too much explanation?

We seem to be at an impasse and are looking for some guidance as we wander through this quagmire of names. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,
C+R

My first suggestion is that if you have a girl, you give her the middle name Claire. This balances the very common patriarchal naming tradition happening on your side of the family; and, as a lucky bonus, Claire works beautifully as a middle name. I seriously regret that I didn’t even consider using my first or middle name as a middle name for my own daughter, especially since my family too has that familiar “middle name is the father’s first name” thing happening for male children (along with the even more familiar “and of course we use the father’s family surname for all the children”), so you’d think it would have occurred to me to use a parallel idea for female children. Lucille Claire; Margot Claire.

For a boy, I think you have a terrific list and can’t go wrong. That can make the decision more difficult, as you’ve found, but it can also be soothing to think “The reason none of them are rising to the top is that they’re all so great; no matter what we choose, we’re likely to be really happy with it.” If the middle name and the surname are both from your side of the family, then for balance/fairness I suggest your wife have final say in the choice of the first name, and/or that the two of you choose the name from among her top favorites.

With a good long list of candidates, I recommend making ranked lists: you and your wife each put all the names on the list in order, ranked 1, 2, 3, etc.; more than one name can share a ranking. So just as an example, perhaps your lists (truncated for the sake of the example) would look like this:

Peter 1
Samuel 1
Joseph 1
Ernest 2
Benjamin 2
Frederick 2
Franklin 3
George 4
Charlie 4
Augustine 4

Franklin 1
Frederick 1
Peter 1
Samuel 2
Joseph 2
Benjamin 2
George 3
Ernest 3
Charlie 4
Augustine 4

In this example, you could feel pretty safe taking George, Charlie, and Augustine out of the finalists, because they’re #3 or #4 for both of you and not likely to be chosen over the other candidates. You might also perhaps decide you could safely remove any names that were #4 or below for EITHER parent, even if the name were #1 for the other parent. Peter, at #1 for both of you in this example, would get a little star; perhaps any name ranked #1 by one of you and #2 by the other (in this example: Samuel, Joseph, Frederick) could also get a little star. Names ranked #2 by both parents could be good compromise names for lists where all of one parent’s #1 names happened to be the other parent’s #3 names and vice versa. And so on.

Even some of the less-common biblical names have gone mainstream in the last couple of decades, which helps considerably if you’re trying to hit a nice balance between “our Catholic faith is important to us” and “not too biblical.” Of the three you’re wondering about, I think the name Peter is the freshest: the name Samuel has ranked in the 20s for well over two decades; the name Joseph was in the Top 20 from the time the online Social Security records begin in 1900 until just over a decade ago when it slipped into the 20s near Samuel; the name Peter is ranked in the 200s.

However, I’m not sure about any of those three names with your surname. Make sure you’re trying them without the middle name acting as a buffer: Samuel Stoiberg; Joseph Stoiberg; Peter Stoiberg. Peter in particular seems to merge with the surname; Joseph in particular seems to transition awkwardly to the surname. (Make sure you try this with the girl names, too: normally it will be just the first and last names said together, rather than first/middle/last.)

Typically I urge parents not to worry too much about the names of pets: for example, if you’d grown up with a dog named Charlie, I would say soothing things about how you’re not really naming the child AFTER the dog, and also that most people won’t even know your childhood pet’s name. In this case, since your parents acquired/named the dog only a few years ago, I would use this as a little lesson for us all in being careful about naming pets, lest we accidentally rule out names we would have loved for our grandchildren.

I for one am ready to hear the name Douglas on little kids again. The nickname Doc feels like a stretch, and I find joke nicknames a little wearisome, but you could give it a try. For me it matters if the honor to the great-grandfathers is because they were named Douglas or if it’s because they were doctors. If they were named Douglas, then I think Douglas/Doc works very nicely: you can say “Douglas is a family name” and people will assume you wanted to use an honor name but then made it your own with a cute nickname. If instead the great-grandfathers were doctors, then it feels like a joke/game and makes me feel weary (though I realize this is subjective, and there will be many others who would get a big kick out of it).

From your list, my own favorites are Frederick, Franklin, Louis, George, and Benjamin. Louis Stoiberg is a little hissy on the transition, and Frederick Stoiberg and George Stoiberg both involve a slightly awkward transition, but nothing that would rule them out for me. Actually, on re-reading, I think I personally wouldn’t use George, which is sad, but it keeps feeling difficult and clunky to say; however, if I saw the name on someone else’s child I would not give it more than a moment’s thought or feel it had been a mistake. Probably I would not use Theodore, either, because of the very similar near-rhyming ending of the surname; again, I wouldn’t think it was a mistake on someone else’s child.

If you plan to have more children, it can be helpful to look ahead to future hypothetical sibling names. I think you could easily and successfully combine many of the names on the boy-name list (and in fact that would be a lot of fun: Frederick and Augustine! Benjamin and Louis! Douglas and Franklin!), but I would cross-check the girl names and the boy names to look for issues. If you use Lucille, does that rule out Louis and vice versa? Looking at the boy names: do you want to avoid repeating initials (e.g., would using Frederick rule out using Franklin)? do you want to avoid rhyming nicknames (e.g., would using Frederick/Freddie rule out using Theodore/Teddy)?

This exercise can also help narrow things down when you have a good long list: if you take each boy-name candidate in turn and combine it with a future sister name, do any pairings make you love the boy-name more? Frederick/Freddie and Lucille/Lucy; Frederick/Freddie and Margot. Benjamin/Benji and Lucille/Lucy; Benjamin/Benji and Margot. And so on.