Posted on by Debbie

Hello my name is…awesome!

I don’t often get requests for specific posts on my blog but recently I had a request for a post about how our daughters were named. This request came from my youngest daughter after she read a post where I told the story about how I was named Debbie. She wanted to know the story behind her name and that of her sisters. I also wrote this post recently  – Weekly Photo Challenge: Names.

I will start by saying my husband is a school teacher and has seen and heard most names. He had a list of names we could not even consider calling our children, from the many students he had taught over the years. I’m sure you understand, especially if you are a teacher!

We never knew what sex our children would be beforehand, so had a selection of names ready to go.  We had the same boy’s name picked out for all three babies but never got to use it – if we’d had a boy he would have been called Timothy James (from our family history research).

So here goes:

Melanie Anne was our firstborn daughter and her name came to me as I was driving through Sydney and saw the name of a shop called Melanie Anne.  The name Melanie was a bit uncommon at that time and it really appealed to me.  As my middle name is Anne, it fitted in really well.  Funnily enough Melanie means Dark One and out of our three daughters she is the darkest – hair, eyes and skin tone.  She is a beautiful girl, inside and out! Each of the others got fairer and fairer as we went along and I often joke that we would have had an albino if we kept going!  Melanie also likes shopping 🙂  I think I’m the only one in the world who always calls her Melanie, everyone else calls her Mel.

With the imminent birth of our second child two years later, my husband decided to look up some old family names from his family history research.  We both agreed on Sarah Jane but also liked Amelia.  Sarah Jane Sawyer (nee Carter) was 3 x great grandmother of our baby Sarah. Right from the start we called her the full ‘Sarah-Jane’ and I intended for this to be her name but after a few years it became simply ‘Sarah’.  She is not very impressed with her name even now, as she considers it to be very common!  Sarah means Princess and she will always be our beautiful little princess, no matter how old she is.

For our third baby we liked the idea of continuing with using old family names and we had a few choices –  Emma, Emily, Amelia and Eliza were the front runners and right up until the time of her birth I wasn’t sure which one I would call her.  For some reason I decided on Eliza, I think because it was different, unusual and pretty.  She is a unique individual, beautiful and strong with a lovely personality. She was often called Elizabeth as she was growing up, as people thought Eliza was short for Elizabeth but she soon set them straight!  Eliza was named after her 4 x great grandmother Eliza Ann Carter (nee Miller) who just happened to be the mother of Sarah Jane Carter (see paragraph above regarding the naming of Sarah Jane).  As we had already used Anne (with an e on the end) as Melanie’s middle name we chose Kate for her middle name, for no particular reason.  Eliza Kate had a nice ring to it and she is often called EK for short.

It’s funny how the old names are becoming so popular again, there are some very pretty names amongst the family records.  It’s nice to use them to keep the family history alive.

Other family stories of interest:

My mother’s name is Sheila which she hated for a while.  My mother came to Australia from England as a beautiful blonde, blue eyed, 16 year old in 1955.  Sheila is a very common word for female in Australian slang and my mother did not appreciate the Australian  humour at the time.  She tells us that she almost changed her name to Shelley because of the way her name was bandied about.

My husband’s name is Grant but everyone called him Buster up until he started school. His younger brother Cliff couldn’t say Grant very well so he grew up calling him Dant.  Grant had trouble with saying  Cliff so called him Tiff for many years.

I am very proud of my daughters and will talk about them anywhere to anyone.  They like to laugh at me and still ask who is my favourite and vie for attention when they all get together. They are all individuals and remarkable in their own right.  Clever, beautiful and caring and I love them all to bits!  I wrote a post about each of them a few years ago, comparing our different lives at the same age and I still consider these to be my favourite posts. You can find them here if you’re interested:   Melanie, Sarah and Eliza.

So that’s the story about how the girls were named!  Here’s a lovely photo of them with Grant at Christmas time when we had them all in the one country together (it’s not very common as Melanie lives in UK).

Family

So, to the title of my post – Hello my name is awesome – Eliza loves being awesome, so as she requested this post she can have naming rights too 🙂

Deb 🙂

PS.  I’ve finally managed to write a suitable  post for Ritu’s #Loveuary challenge

30 Replies to “Hello my name is…awesome!”

  2. Pingback: Share Your World – March 27 2017 – Deb's World

  4. What a great story. I think somehow it connects your family to tell that history! My name Dagne which we pronounce dah-knee comes from a dear friend of my grandmothers. Dagne actually went on a date with my grandfather and decided that he was a bit too short for her. She had met another young man she thought she liked better. She went to her room mate (my grandmother, Marit Hefty) and convinced her to date my grandfather instead. Those couples married each other. All of the children in our family start with D and this is the name I got. It means New Day in Norwegian.

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    1. What an absolute brilliant story!! I love it. Thanks for sharing and showing how to pronounce your name, it’s lovely. Thanks for reading and enjoying my post and for taking the time to leave a great comment. 😊

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  8. Pingback: What Is In A Name? | But I Smile Anyway...

  11. Gorgeous photo; and a great post. I love hearing how people choose names, especially since we had the boy-child. My partner isn’t a teacher, but still seemed to have a very long list of no-go names. By the time the baby was born the pool of possible names was pretty small and the only “discussion” was over the order. Oddly, we’d been told at the 20 week scan that he was a girl, but neither of us really believed it, so we only really had boys names picked out. Both T and I have siblings who’ve given their children really really unusual names, so we were determined not to burden our kid with anything that could be playground bullying fodder, and both wanted to connect him to wider family. Luckily we both had a favourite uncle with the same name.

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    1. Thanks for your lovely reply Su, it’s always interesting to me to find about these very important issues. Giving a child a name for life is a very big decision to make together. How funny that you both didn’t believe the scan result! I just ‘knew’ by the third baby that we would have another girl and I was thrilled with that. Nice to have your comment 🙂

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  12. I am Anabel. My aunt is Annabella, but always known as Annabel, and my great aunt was also Annabella, known as Annie. My middle name is Christine after my mother (Christina) and my sister is Elspeth Anne after two of my Dad’s sisters. Not much imagination in our family, though I seem to have got the economy version of the name!

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  14. Being a (retired) teacher/school administrator I totally get your husband having a list of names that he would never consider! I love all three names that you chose (especially Sarah-Jane) and your family research that went into your name selection.
    BTW – I also really like the name Joanne…and am off to read Louise’s post now!

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  15. I really enjoyed reading this post about your 3 daughters and the decision making that went into the selection of their name. Attaching a name to a new human being is a huge responsibility and one that we struggled with for our 2 boys … largely because my husband is French-Canadian. His family doesn’t speak English, so whatever names we chose had to be compatible in either language. As someone who has hated my name all my life, I can only hope they don’t feel the same.

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