Nameberry intern and guest blogger Danielle Miksza loves all things vampire, including the strange and wonderful world of vampire baby names.  She enlightens us on the options.

Vampires seem to be everywhere these days: in books and movies, on television and the internet, even occasionally living next door.  As a twenty year-old who believes Halloween should be declared a national holiday, I can’t help but be consumed by the vampire craze.

One reason for my vampire obsession is that they are portrayed as dark and lonely creatures nobody quite understands.  As an only child, I was often lonely growing up.  I did odd things such as talk to myself or giggle at absolutely nothing.  People were a bit unnerved by me and kept their distance.  So yes, when I read about a vampire feeling like an outcast from the rest of the world, I have an idea of what that feels like.

More reasons for my vampire fanaticism: I stay up all night; I hate the sunlight, and garlic does not agree with me. Who knows? I could be a bit of a vampire myself.

Once you look past the fangs and blood lust, vampires are actually quite attractive. Who could resist a guy with incredible strength, gorgeous eyes, pointy yet very white teeth, and a handsome name? Stephenie Meyer gave us girls one of the greatest gifts of all in her series Twilight: Edward Cullen. Just the thought of that immortal makes me light-headed. He’s rich. He’s gorgeous. And he’s telepathic. How often do you come across guys like that?

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Guest blogger and name lover Eleanor Nickerson, aka nameberry’s own Elea, tells us all about the exotic and gorgeous names from Cornwall, the exotic and gorgeous region in the southwest of England.

The first time I visited Cornwall was at the tender age of one. Sadly, my dad’s abiding memory of that holiday was a grouching baby grizzling all through his long-awaited sailing trip (something he has yet to fully forgive me for to this day). A few years later my parents bravely returned again, one more child in tow, and fortunately much fun and sandcastle-building ensued.

It wasn’t until several years later when I returned to the region as a fifteen year-old that I was truly able to appreciate the breath-taking beauty of the Cornish coast and countryside. In the intervening years since my last visit I had developed an avid, border-line obsessive, passion for names and their meanings. What struck me was that many houses were named instead of numbered, and these place names, along with those adorning road signs, quickly caught my attention both due to the foreign sound to English ears, and the similarity to my greatest name-love: Welsh names.

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We’re honored to have Michael Shackleford, the inventor of the Social Security baby name popularity list, as today’s nameberry guest blogger.  Shackleford played a pivotal role in the history of American baby naming by constructing the first national count of the Top 1000 names.  Shackleford, who can now be found at the Wizard of Odds, talks about the hows and whys behind his ground-breaking work.

The most frequent question I get about my baby name popularity lists is why I started making them.  To give some context to why, my name is Michael, and I was born in 1965.  At that time, and for every year from 1961 to 1998, Michael was the most popular boys name in the United States.  When I was in elementary school, there were always one or two other Michaels in the same class.  When the teacher called on “Michael,” we all had to ask, “Which one?”  At my first job, in a fast food place at Knott’s Berry Farm, there was a big board with everybody’s name and daily cash register errors.  When I was hired, there was already a Mike Smiley on the list.  So I had to become Mike Sh.  After that, everybody would whisper, “We better be quiet, Mike Shhhhh is here.”  To this day, every time somebody calls out “Mike” in public, I have to turn around and investigate.  Usually, I’m not the intended recipient and end up looking like I came in second place in a popularity contest, when the other Michael is warmly identified.  Over the years it has become very annoying.

In 1992, I took a job with the Office of the Actuary at the Social Security Administration headquarters in Baltimore.  My main duty was to estimate the effect to the trust funds given a hypothetical change in Social Security law.  I used samplings of Social Security records, calculating the monthly payment under the current law and the proposed changes, took the difference, and adjusted for the sample size.  I had lots of interesting data at my fingertips to make such calculations.  One of the more interesting files was a 1% sampling of Social Security card applications.

Five years later, in 1997, my wife was expecting our first child.  Naturally, after my negative experiences as one of many Michaels, I was not about to give my child a popular name, but I no longer had any idea what the popular names were.  Keeping up to date was not easy at the time, especially for girl names, which go up and down in popularity much faster than boy names.  It was only my intent to stay out of the top 25 or so.  Many people incorrectly assume I take the extreme position of advocating a name nobody has heard of.  No, a normal name is fine with me, just as it is not too trendy or conformist.

To determine what the most popular names were at the time, I wrote a simple program to sort the Social Security card data first by year of birth, then by gender, and then by first name.  It takes a while to go through a tape of millions of records, but after about an hour the results came in.  What I got back was a huge document of first name popularity lists dating back to the 1880’s.  I believe my eyes at that moment were the first to ever see an accurate nationwide sampling of given names.

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Hope Edelman, today’s guest blogger, is the acclaimed author of the influential bestseller Motherless Daughters; her new book, a fascinating and inspirational personal odyssey titled The Possibility of Everything, is out this week.

 My daughter got her name from a San Francisco Guardian newspaper box.

Actually, she got her name from a prophetic graffiti artist who chose a Guardian newspaper box as his canvas. But I get ahead of myself.

It was September 1997, my eighth month of pregnancy, and my husband and I were taking our last pre-baby vacation. All the way up the California coast, we debated what to name our daughter.  She was to be named after my mother, Marcia, who’d died when I was seventeen. By Jewish tradition, this meant we needed a name starting with an M.  After several false starts we’d  narrowed the field to Maya— popular in my husband’s native Israeli culture–and Melanie, just because we liked it.

That evening, we checked into a hotel just outside Chinatown. As we were getting dressed for dinner, the debate continued.  Maya or Melanie? Melanie or Maya? The decision felt like a profound one, a label our unborn daughter would carry with her for life, and given that it was one of the very first choices we’d make for her as parents, we wanted to get this one right.

As circumstance would have it, we didn’t have to make the decision alone. When we stepped onto the sidewalk for dinner, we were greeted by spray-painted graffiti letters sprawled across a newsbox right in front of the hotel:  MAYA.  I stood there staring at the letters in disbelief. Even to a hardcore skeptic like me, it seemed like some kind of sign.

We named our daughter Maya Jill. Three years later, we took her on a journey to Central America to get rid of a troubling imaginary friend, a story I tell in my newest book, The Possibility of Everything. 

When one of my friends read an early draft of the book, he was concerned about my use of names. They were just “a little too precious,” he said.  “Maya was healed by a Maya healer, and your name is Hope? No one’s going to believe it.”

But what could I do? It’s a memoir. It would have been silly to create pseudonyms for my daughter and myself. So I left our names as they are.

Granted, it was confusing as a writer to have “Maya” describe both a child and a culture.  I had to do constant and fancy gymnastics to keep Maya’s name from appearing in the same sentence where “Maya” was also used as an adjective or proper noun (as in “Maya temples” or “the ancient Maya”).   (more…)

Appellation Mountain’s Abby Sandel, one of nameberry’s favorite guest bloggers, writes about what names mean beyond what the books say they mean.

When I refer to the secret meaning of names, I’m not talking about kaballah.  I’m not even talking about names like Nevaeh, where the so-called secret meaning is quite clear.

Instead, I’m intrigued by the difference between the meanings given by baby books and the reasons our parents pick our names.

Head to most baby name websites, or flip open your favorite book to Kayla.  Or Kaylee.  Or Kaitlyn.  Odds are that the guides will offer a one-word meaning: pure.  They might also note that Kayla, Kaylee, Kaitlyn and kin are considered variants of Katherine.  As well as Kathryn, Cathryn, Katrina, Katinka, Caylee … the entry could fill a page.

Name aficionados will pause and reflect that Katherine’s meaning is debated.  It is likely that Katherine’s origins are wrapped up with the goddess Hecate, she of witches and demons.  At some point the name was altered to more closely resemble the Greek katharos, which does mean pure.

But if your mother loved the soap opera Days of Our Lives in the 1980s, she probably had the popular character in mind when she planned to call her firstborn daughter Kayla.

Or maybe your father’s mother was called Kay, and Kayla seemed like a fitting way to honor grandma.

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