{"id":12284,"date":"2016-08-20T10:20:11","date_gmt":"2016-08-20T14:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=12284"},"modified":"2016-08-20T10:20:11","modified_gmt":"2016-08-20T14:20:11","slug":"baby-naming-issue-trying-to-honor-four-matriarchs-at-once","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2016\/08\/20\/baby-naming-issue-trying-to-honor-four-matriarchs-at-once\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Naming Issue: Trying to Honor Four Matriarchs at Once"},"content":{"rendered":"

So my husband and I are having our first baby girl, she’s not due any time soon. It’s very important to me that I honor the matriarchs of my family, it’s crucial actually. But I feel like this first girl, being that none of her cousins has taken on a family name, we can’t leave a matriarch out, we must somehow include them all. We’re okay with two middle names. The most important name is Maggie, my dads mom, Margaret, always went by Maggie. I love Margaret, my husband does not. He’s fine with Maggie being on the birth certificate but I feel like she needs a more formal name. My great grandmother was Opal May, we both love both names. My moms mom is Nola, which we also love. My mom is Thia… So how do we incorporate all of these names? We live in North Carolina, I’m not from here, he is, I do love the southern names. The best we’ve come up with is Magnolia May Ellis (“Maggie” and Ellis being our last name) but also Nola and Thia are incorporated and May for Opal… My concern is southerners pronounce it Magnolya, I like the Eah sound better, but that won’t happen in the south.<\/p>\n

Do you have any other suggestions of how to get all these names into one fabulous name? And no we can’t leave anyone out… They would be heart broken and so would I<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Let’s unpick this a bit. I think it is very unlikely that all four matriarchs would be heartbroken if they were not ALL honored on ONE child. Could you ask one or more of the matriarchs about this? My guess is that they would be eager to reassure you that this is not a goal you have to shoot for.<\/p>\n

Also, are you planning more children? If you use all four essential matriarch names on your firstborn, what is the plan for the names of subsequent children?<\/p>\n

My feeling is that you have built up an impossible logic problem, and that the way to solve it is to remove the untrue elements (“we must somehow include them all,” “we can’t leave anyone out of they would be heartbroken”) rather than to drive yourselves crazy looking for a solution. Did anyone leap from a cliff when other babies in the family were not named after all the men\/women in that family tree? No? Then you do not have to take this burden on yourselves. And my guess is that you will be glad, when naming future children, to still have good names left to use.<\/p>\n

The usual plan for parents who like honor names is to use one or two honor names per child, so that everyone gets some, and so that the honorees have room to feel honored. The dilemma, then, is whose names to use first, and in what name order. There can be reasons to move a person’s name up in line: for example, if any of the matriarchs are elderly and you would definitely like them to know they have a namesake before it’s too late to tell them. Some names can honor more than one person: if, for example, you use your mom’s mom’s name, you are honoring both your grandmother (because it’s her name) and your mom (because it’s her beloved mother’s name, and represents her side of the family). And of course your own personal tastes will enter into it: if you have two people you’d like to honor, but you like one person’s name better than the other person’s name, that could alter your decision.<\/p>\n

If Margaret\/Maggie is the most important of the names, then I would make an effort to use that name for the firstborn child. But because you two love Opal, May, and Nola, and you don’t agree on Margaret\/Maggie, I would use Margaret as the middle name and choose the most important of Opal\/May\/Nola as the first name for this child. So here are what your options would be if I were in charge:<\/p>\n

Opal Margaret Ellis
\nMay Margaret Ellis
\nNola Margaret Ellis<\/p>\n

I would give priority to Opal and Nola, since May is a middle name. I would also give priority to a name that comes from your mother’s side of the family, since Margaret comes from your father’s side. You don’t mention whether the two of you both love the name Thia; if you do, that’s a fourth option:<\/p>\n

Thia Margaret Ellis<\/p>\n

Then let’s say time passes and you have a second little girl. Pick the NEXT two most important names for her (based on family feeling, age of family member, etc.), and put the name you prefer first. Or if you have a boy, you may want to consider using the name Nolan to honor Nola. Perhaps this first child could be Opal Margaret, and the next could be either Nola or Nolan.<\/p>\n

If you absolutely insist on honoring four women with one baby’s name, and if you don’t think anyone will be hurt by being a second middle name or having their names combined\/modified, and you don’t mind having no honor names left for possible future daughters, then I think your solution works pretty well. I don’t see Thia in there, unless you mean the -ia of Magnolia, but you’ve got at least plausible references to everyone else.<\/p>\n

I think if it were me I would prefer to use all the actual first names and just heap them up: Margaret Opal Thia Nola Ellis. I would not normally want to use so many names, but if I felt I HAD to, I think I would just go ahead and REVEL in it: “YOU get an honor name and YOU get an honor name and YOU get an honor name and YOU get an honor name!” The amusingly long name shifts the situation in my mind from stressful heartbreak-avoidance to a near-comical rejoicing in so many great women. And then look at them all in the list! It’s a loving family reunion of a name. I can picture everyone standing around laughing and crying at the same time—and without you having to explain who was honored by which part of which name.<\/p>\n

But again, I urge\u00a0 you to reconsider the premises of this dilemma. DO you need to honor ALL FOUR with one child’s name? WILL everyone’s heart be broken if you don’t? It would be such a ludicrously unreasonable thing for a family to expect, it’s hard for me to work on the assumption that they do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So my husband and I are having our first baby girl, she’s not due any time soon. It’s very important to me that I honor the matriarchs of my family, it’s crucial actually. But I feel like this first girl, being that none of her cousins has taken on a family name, we can’t leave […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-3c8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12285,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12284\/revisions\/12285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}