You have helped me name a couple of our children (Juniper Lucy<\/a>, born in 2009, and Nikolai Dickson<\/a>, adopted in 2012) – thank you!<\/p>\n We are adopting again and looking to preserve something of our new daughter’s birth name while also reflecting her belonging in our family, as we did with Niko’s name.<\/p>\n We plan to use the name Mary somewhere in her name. It is a family name for us and is similar in sound to her birth surname. One of the options we have stumbled upon is to call her Polly, as a nickname for Mary. This avoids the issue of confusion with several other Marys in our inner circle, and is also just more our style. If we do this we will keep her birth name as her middle name (I should add that the reason we don’t want to use her birth name as her first name is that it is similar to one of our other daughters’ names, but we may end up just doing it anyway.)<\/p>\n My question is does anyone do this anymore? Is the age of putting Mary on the birth certificate of a little Polly over, or do enough people know the history of it that it’s still a valid and legitimate nickname? The name Polly also has the advantage of rhyming with the nickname she goes by in the orphanage, which we hope would ease the transition for her slightly, but we would definitely want to put Mary on the birth certificate because of the family connection.<\/p>\n I’d love to hear what you and your readers think. Is Mary-called-Polly sweet and full of antique charm or just weird and confusing to modern namers? Do people even know they are\/were related or is it just because I’ve read way too many name books and blogs that I know that?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Answering for myself, I can say that the only reason I knew Molly and Polly were nicknames for Mary is that I happened to see it while looking at baby name books. If I hadn’t seen it in a name book, and someone used Mary\/Polly for a baby, I’m not sure if I’d think “Oh neat!” or if I’d be confused and have trouble remembering it. I THINK I’d be charmed, especially if I looked it up. I have the same issue when I’m mentioning Daisy as a nickname for Margaret: it’s traditional and established, but does that necessarily mean it still makes sense to people now?<\/p>\n I’d LIKE to see more Polly and Daisy for Mary and Margaret, so I’m motivated to back the idea. And I’m also in favor of vintage nicknames, which is why I like Sadie and Sally for Sarah, and Meg and Maggie for Margaret, and Betsy and Bess for Elizabeth. And it seems like the current environment is very open to unusual name\/nickname combinations, not only for juniors and thirds and fourths but also for names that have a sound or a couple of letters in common but are otherwise unrelated.<\/p>\n (As an aside, my mother and I were both recently charmed by the Mary _____ double-first-name concept: Mary Agnes, Mary Katherine, Mary Alice, Mary Margaret, etc., if that would work for your situation.)<\/p>\n So what I think what both Jodi and I are interested to know is what approximate percentage of people already KNOW about the Mary\/Polly connection, to see how much of an uphill battle it might be, if any. Let’s have a poll!<\/p>\n [yop_poll id=”7″]<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Name update!<\/strong> Jodi writes:<\/p>\n I wanted to update you on the post you did for us back in April: “Baby Naming Issue: Do People Know Polly Is a Nickname for Mary?”\u00a0 We actually had to set our girl’s name in stone legally on our first trip to her birth country way back in July, but I wanted to wait until she was home safe and sound to update so that I could send a picture!<\/p>\n At the time you posted our question, we had all but decided to abandon Polly and stick with our original favorite.\u00a0 All the lovely comments about Polly really made me reconsider!\u00a0 But, in the end, we went with our first love, and it suits her so perfectly.\u00a0 She is Delphinia Mary Y., called Delia pretty much exclusively.\u00a0 I mentioned in the comments that Delphinia is a near-translation of her original name, though it sounds nothing like it, and I love how it preserves something of who she was before she was ours.\u00a0 She’s been with us now for almost a month, and we’re all totally in love.\u00a0 She is the beautiful brunette in our sea of blond in the photo.<\/p>\n Thank you (and your readership!) so much for your help,<\/p>\n Jodi writes: You have helped me name a couple of our children (Juniper Lucy, born in 2009, and Nikolai Dickson, adopted in 2012) – thank you! We are adopting again and looking to preserve something of our new daughter’s birth name while also reflecting her belonging in our family, as we did with Niko’s name. 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