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 5
Ann/Anne 3
Michelle 3
Renee 3
Catherine 2
Faith 2
Jacqueline/Jacklyn 2
Jane 2
Leigh 2
Madison 2
Riley 2
Michael 6
David 5
James 3
Patrick 3
Andrew 2
Daniel 2
Francis 2
Joseph 2
Matthew 2
Nicholas 2
Richard 2
Ronald 2
Stephen/Steven 2
William 2
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.
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.
There was a nice assortment of older middle names: Paula, Dorothy, Marion, Lorraine; Bruce, Clarence, Laurence, Conrad.
There were several middle names I hoped were the birth surname of the child’s other parent.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Ha ha – I checked all the boxes up there with my 2006er’s middles names of Marie Rose and my 2008er’s middle names of Grace Elizabeth. Marie, Rose and Elizabeth were family nods and Grace was my “fun” choice.
Ok, your last paragraph made me smile. That sounds absolutely lovely. When one of my sons was in first grade, the parents got a homework assignment to talk about the kid’s name, and it was pretty much my favorite thing ever.
I was also surprised by Marie and Lynn! Pretty much every one of my classmates (born in 1980) had those middle names.
I also had to laugh at the boys’ middle names, since the top 2 are my sons’ middle names. Both family names, meaningful to us, but not much variety!
I find this stuff super interesting.
Sort of related, but the graduating class ahead of me in high school had less than 50 people. And at least 8 girls had a form of Kristin, Kristy, Christina, etc. And my class of 70 had none. How weird is that???
One of the perks of being a teacher is all the names I get to see…125 new combinations and a time capsule of the naming trend from a particular birth year, every year!
I wish my daughter’s school had included the middle names. That would have made the ceremony much more enjoyable! She just graduated high school too. Her first name is Rose, so she knows many girls have Rose as a middle name.
Glancing at first names in her class of 400 or so, Ella is showing up a lot. Something else I noticed was two girls with the same first name, exact same spelling, and then their last names were just one letter off – so one ended in -en and one ended in -es. That was something you could never predict. A few days later I found out that on my son’s freshman baseball team, there were two Masons with the exact same surname. So they had to go by Mason + their middle initial, rather than their last name initial.
I find this fascinating! As a mid-80s baby in the UK, nearly everyone in my circle had the middle names Jane, Louise, Elizabeth, Marie, Anne or Victoria! And a fair few Roses even then.
My own is Katherine and my sister’s is Eleanor – so both very classic names and not unexpected but not super common either (my first name is established but uncommon though so I’ve always been happy to have a more mainstream middle).
My own daughter’s is Josephine, which again is not uncommon but I think goes against the current trend for short single syllable middles (Rose, Joy, Elle, Kate, Grace).
I’m about the same age as your oldest child, and Marie is hands down the dominating middle name among my peers, and doesn’t feel dated at all to me, just boring. My childhood best friend’s is Marie, my sister in law’s is Marie, at one point in college my roommates’ middle names were Marie, Mary, and Marie. (Mine is a very uncommon family name.)
Grace, Ann, Elizabeth, and Rose jump to mind next as common in my age group, in roughly that order, but nowhere near touching Marie.
Just got my high schoolers year book and in one grade of only 30 something kids three are named Nico!
My daughter graduated this past week, in a class of 756 graduates. I don’t have the stamina to tally up all the names, but based on a browse through the program, I’d guess that the most common European middle names are Grace, Rose, Elizabeth, and Clair(e) for girls and Thomas, Andrew, James, and Michael for boys. Probably about half the class are immigrants or children of immigrants from places with non-European naming conventions, so it’s quite possible that the actual most common names in the class aren’t European.
One thing they did that I liked was to have each kid make a recording of their name a couple of weeks before graduation, which were then used by the homeroom teachers to read them at graduation. The kids could choose however they wanted their names read – middle name or not, nickname or full name, entirely different name unrelated to the legal name, etc. And it helped greatly with potential pronunciation issues of those non-European names. Some teachers clearly put some significant effort into learning long unfamiliar multi-syllabic names, which I appreciated.
We had two graduations this year (high school and college). My dad entertained himself by looking for Williams (he is a third-generation William) and noticing with interest/regret that there were very few Williams in either class–although the college in particular was only about half anglo-saxon names. I was able to point him to the latest SSA baby names list, which has William in the top ten.
I just went to my baby’s pre-k graduation (???) and they listed the names of the “graduates” inconsistently. Like, some kids had First Last, other kids had First Middle Last, and others had First Middle Middle Last or possibly First Middle Last Last. Seeing the long strings of family names (a lot of the students are Hispanic and they really go in for the family names) was fun and made it seem more serious, while my little First Last (middle not listed) seemed sort of unfinished.
I was paying attention to names at graduation, too (but not actually keeping track). I’ll have another graduation in a year, though, so maybe I will do that. You’ve got to occupy yourself somehow during that long part where it’s just names.
My favorite first-middle combo I heard was Aaron Zachary. I like how it sounds but also how it goes from A to Z. There was a backwards version, too. I can’t remember it exactly, but it was something like Zane Alexander, one of those names and maybe both. Come to think of it, wouldn’t that be a great brother-pair?
BTW, congrats to your grads.
My brother’s name is Zachary Aaron and his surname starts with K. He goes by Zak.
I was born a few years before these kids (I graduated college about a year ago) and I never knew that my middle name (Ann) was an “old fashioned” middle name haha – although I and my sibling got our middle names because they were our parents’ middle names – my mom’s middle name is Ann, my sibling got my dad’s middle name as theirs. I’m not sure how common this convention is (none of my peers that I’ve asked got their middle names this way), but the impression I get from my parents is they just didn’t want to deal with coming up with another name for us. I also know tooooons of people with the middle name Rose, it feels very much like the standard white girl middle name haha
I have my mom’s middle name (Sue) and my brother has my dad’s middle name (Gene). My other 3 siblings don’t. My middle sister has my grandma’s first name, but her name was Marie, so it was probably less about being named after my grandma and more about it sounding good with her name. My last two sister don’t have family middle names at all.
My family has a history of passing on middle names and also repositioning them as first names.
In one instance, grandfather, son, and grandson all have the same middle name, although the grandfather goes exclusively by his middle name.
My father’s middle name was also his grandfather’s middle name. When my brother was born, they used the family middle name for my brother’s first name.
Another family member’s middle name was his great-great grandfather’s first name. He then used that name as a first for his son. While by no means odd/weird, it is used very infrequently and was given to only nine baby boys in their state the year the child was born (117 baby boys nationally). They plan to give a future daughter mom’s middle name as a first, if they are so blessed.