Today’s Question of the Week was inspired by a comment on our Facebook page, noting that names that end with the letter A were a “family tradition” for that berry.

How interesting!  While family name traditions are more conventionally thought of as calling all the oldest child Joseph or Elizabeth or giving children names that start with the same letter, there really is no strict definition to what might constitute a naming tradition.

So we put the question to you: What are the naming traditions in your own family?

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Do you want to share that with the class, Sarah?

Sarahmezz’s thread in the forums, which asks What are your grandparents’ names?, sounded like an intriguing one to put to the Nameberry community.

Indeed, the question has been asked before, but never as our official Question of the Week.

So please let us know your grandparents’ names, your great-grandparents’ names, and which you’d pass on to the next generation.

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A while back we did a blog called Not Your Mother’s Baby Names, about names that fail to bridge the gender gap. That post focused on newly-minted names that the older generations may not get, but those aren’t the only kinds of names that don’t translate across the generations.  

Mom may have liked perky cheerleader names — Kerry, Missy — while you prefer serious Biblical names — Abraham and Lydia.  Time-honored choices such as August and Imogen that sound classic and handsome to you may feel hopelessly dowdy to her.

The fact is, each generation tends to reinvent baby names anew, gravitating to new choices and new tastes in names. It’s how we make our name choices our own — but by definition, that may mean that Mom (and Dad and Grandma and Aunt Sue) fails to like or understand them.

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Duana Taha reports that she and her new husband are compatible in every way, until they start talking about baby names.

I recently got married, and we’re very happy. Like a lot of just-married couples, we’re thinking about children in the near future, which is great.

Except we forgot one crucial thing. A baby name pre-nup.

Do most couples work out their baby names before they agree to be tied together forever? Was I unaware? Because there are some issues here we definitely should have discussed…!

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It’s one of the biggest problems parents-to-be complain about on the Nameberry forums: family pressure over the choice of a name.

Grandparents want the baby to be Leonard Roger III.  Great-Aunt Matilda always wanted a little girl named Matilda.

If not promoting their own or other relatives’ names, family members might just exercise what they see as their right to voice strong, uh, opinions about names.  Ugh, you can’t name your son Felix: That’s a cat’s name!

Every time you see them, they push their choices — Kaylee!  Kenneth! — and reject yours.

Have you gotten pressure from your family over baby names?  What kind?  How did you deal with it?  How did it make you feel?

Or was your family blessedly pressure-free on the topic of names?  Or maybe you even tried to talk about names with them, and they weren’t interested?

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