In her second blog for Nameberry, celebrity mom and name lover Natalie Hanson, who has five children with musician husband Taylor, reveals how and why they chose the adventurous Wilhelmina for their second daughter’s name.

Hello Berries! Last time I wrote to you, I shared that I was expecting a little girl and that we were searching for her perfect name. Our daughter arrived in October, and we named her Wilhelmina.  Wilhelmina is a form of William, which means “resolute protection”.  Right now I am so in love with this strong and beautiful name, and even more in love with the girl who bears it!

The story of Wilhelmina’s name starts in October 2010, two years before her arrival, when I came across the name Wilhelmina on a Nameberry list!  My first impression of the name was how strong it sounded. It was like the “Isabella” you wouldn’t want to mess with.

I decided to pass the name along to my sister-in-law, Jessica, who is a fan of strong, Germanic-warrior sounding names. Jessie appreciated the suggestion and told me it reminded her of Willa Cather, the author of Oh, Pioneers!, a book she had read a few years before.  Her choice of books did not surprise me, as I have always thought of Jessie as a sort of “pioneer woman”.  She is one of the strongest, hardest working, most loyal women you could ever know.

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For the past couple of years, Charlotte has been at or near the top of the list of Berry favorites, and it’s not hard to see why.  It’s a name at the very center of the Sweet Spot of names with a ton of great attributes and references—literary, historic, and royal.  She’s demure, yet solid and strong, classic but not stuffy, British with the slightest trace of a French accent–one of the very best classic girls’ names.

She has so much going for her that we thought that she deserved a whole blog to herself.

History

Like her cousin Caroline, Charlotte is a feminine form of Charles, but arrived there in a roundabout way.  Charlotte is actually the English and French version of the Italian Carlotta, itself a feminine version of Carlo, the Italian Charles, and has been in English-speaking use since the seventeenth century.  In the fifteenth century, Carlotta of Savoy married King Louis XI of France, where her name became Gallicized as Charlotte, a form which then emigrated to England during the next century.

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Yes, there are baby names that have had longer runs at the top of the popularity list.  Mary and John, certainly, and, more recently, Michael, who ruled for 44 years, yet none of them came to be seen as an epidemic or to signify a whole generation in the way that Jennifer did, though she was Number 1 for a mere fifteen years.

But in that time, between 1970 and 1984, there were 859,112 little Jennifers born in the US—enough for online Jennifer identity-loss support groups to spring up as they matured, enough for future parents to bemoan “I don’t want my child to be one of five named Jennifer in her class,” and enough for us to call our first book Beyond Jennifer and Jason.  Jennifer became a one-girl baby names trend.

But why Jennifer?  A once obscure Cornish form of the old Welsh Gwenhwyfar, aka Guinevere, a name that was hardly heard here before 1938—except for an appearance in a 1905 Shaw play– and which didn’t enter the Top 100 till 1956.

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It’s an all girl baby names issue of Appellation Mountain‘s Abby Sandel’s Nameberry 9 newsiest names this week.

Did you hear?  Barack Obama declined to offer baby name advice.

The president hosted a fireside chat on Google+ last week.  He tackled complex, divisive topics like the environment and the economy.

But baby names?

When writer and vlogger John Green introduced his wife, Sarah, and asked Obama if he’d help them choose a name for their second child, the president passed.

Had Green asked that question on the Nameberry forums, we would have all dived in fearlessly.  What’s your firstborn’s name?  Do you have any middles picked out?

Giving baby name advice is tough.  It means sorting names into the good and the bad, or maybe the good and the less good.  Explaining why we like a name is nearly impossible sometimes, isn’t it?  Explaining what we dislike can be too easy.

This week’s news was filled with gorgeous girls’ names representing every possible style and trend, from imports to underused classics to modern discoveries.

The nine most newsworthy baby names are:

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