I have two children. When my eldest was born my wife, who is Chinese, was determined to give him an uncommon name. She didn’t want anything that sounded ethnic, or a name that was in the family already, or one that reminded her of people she didn’t like. That created problems for us, because I’m Irish and Italian, so eliminating names that sound ethnic eliminates a lot of names, even before you add family names to the list. She was also convinced, incorrectly, that the child was going to be a girl.

Once you eliminate all of the above that left us with a few Anglo-Saxon names, and she settled on Georgiana, Victoria, and Henrietta. Then she realized that the girlfriend (who is also Chinese) of a close friend of ours was named Victoria, so that dinged Victoria, and I pointed out to her that my great grandmother was Henrietta. She was still ok with Henrietta because she said she didn’t know her, but I did, so that was too close, generationally speaking, for her, so she settled on Georgiana.

Except the child was a boy, so Georgiana became George. In a concession to sentiment, we gave him a middle name to honor a professor of mine in graduate school who we were very close to, but who died in the middle of my studies.

The process for my second son was a bit different. We just played with combinations she thought were interesting, and when we settled on Alexander Marcus, she liked that because Marcus is the name of a friend of ours from graduate school who she was particularly fond of, but who we hadn’t seen for a long time. He was also impressed that we had thought of him, even if indirectly.

My family, knowing nothing of this, assumed that there was some other significance to the names, especially as I am an academically trained historian. So one of my cousins called to ask, for the family, did we name him Alexander after Alexander the Great and Marcus after Marcus Aurelius, to which I replied yes. That made them all happy, but of course it was not true at all. I just liked the way Alexander Marcus sounded.