I recently attended a high school graduation ceremony. My absolute top favorite part of these ceremonies is getting to see everyone’s middle names. This was a batch of approximately 190 babies born in 2004-2005, and here are the middle names that were used more than once:<\/p>\n
Rose 11
\nElizabeth 10
\nMarie 10
\nLynn 6
\nGrace 5
\nAnn\/Anne 3
\nMichelle 3
\nRenee 3
\nCatherine 2
\nFaith 2
\nJacqueline\/Jacklyn 2
\nJane 2
\nLeigh 2
\nMadison 2
\nRiley 2<\/p>\n
Michael 6
\nDavid 5
\nJames 3
\nPatrick 3
\nAndrew 2
\nDaniel 2
\nFrancis 2
\nJoseph 2
\nMatthew 2
\nNicholas 2
\nRichard 2
\nRonald 2
\nStephen\/Steven 2
\nWilliam 2<\/p>\n
I was especially interested in Rose and Elizabeth: my own Elizabeth, whose graduating class this is, has said numerous times over the years that “EVERYONE’S middle name is Elizabeth.” It was neck-and-neck as I was doing the tally: going through the list, I’d add a Rose, then two Elizabeths, then two Roses, then one Elizabeth.<\/p>\n
I was a little surprised by how many kids had Lynn and Marie and Ann\/Anne as middles: I think of those as being from my own generation—along with Nicole, which at least in this batch of kids seems to have disappeared, so I wonder if its simultaneous use as a first name in the ’70s is what caused it to drop out of sight.<\/p>\n
There was a nice assortment of older middle names: Paula, Dorothy, Marion, Lorraine; Bruce, Clarence, Laurence, Conrad.<\/p>\n
There were several middle names I hoped were the birth surname of the child’s other parent.<\/p>\n
There were quite a few where I wondered if it might be the name of an aunt\/uncle\/parent, or if it could have just still sounded current to the parents at the time the baby was named: names from my own generation such as Michelle, Allison, Jacqueline, Eric, Scott, Jason.<\/p>\n
There were quite a few where I wondered if it was the second-choice name, or if it was The Other’ Parent’s Favorite, or whatever: Olivia, Riley, Ava, Cole, Henry, Jack. (Or Riley\/Cole\/Henry might have been family surnames.)<\/p>\n
There were several middle names that looked to me like they were attempting to honor more than one person. I want to be careful not to put distinctive\/identifying information in a public post, but they were names LIKE: RuthEllen, Rose-Leona, Michelle Amanda.<\/p>\n
There were only a couple of the sort I would put into the category Objectively Fun: names such as Morning or Magic or Sunflower, where you think “Oh, that’s FUN,” and maybe you briefly wish you hadn’t gone for the family name that was in the top ten for a hundred years and so is the same as pretty much EVERYONE’S family name.<\/p>\n
Really what I would have loved best is if each graduate had stood up and told us their name stories. Less talking about bright futures and the first day of the rest of their lives, more talking about was this a family name or did their parents just like it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I recently attended a high school graduation ceremony. My absolute top favorite part of these ceremonies is getting to see everyone’s middle names. This was a batch of approximately 190 babies born in 2004-2005, and here are the middle names that were used more than once: Rose 11 Elizabeth 10 Marie 10 Lynn 6 Grace […]<\/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-16315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-4f9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16315","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=16315"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16325,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16315\/revisions\/16325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}