The Traditions Behind Southern Baby Names

Any true southerner has trouble a comprehending why folks from up North get a chuckle out of Southern baby names. People not in the know suppose that double or even triple names are combined for no other reason than pleasing meter. It may be unreasonable of me, but the idea of a person making jokes about a practice they don't understand just makes me furious. Southerners pick their babies' names for good reasons. Never mind that the names that are chosen are slightly different from the top ten names on the list of most popular baby names for any given year.

Southern moms don't just flip through the most recent books and select names because they are cute or hot at the moment. These mothers take more pains in choosing names for their kids than they did in giving birth to them. That declaration may be a little excessive, but moms in the south literally agonize over what to name their baby. This is because choosing southern baby names takes so much more than considering the different names printed in some generic baby webpage that lists the repeated meanings of various baby names.

Word meanings are great; they have worked for the people who sell Webster's Dictionaries for years! But when you start discussing naming southern infants you're looking at the historical meanings of names within families, not what they might mean to a person who is looking at a definition and only a definition!

As far as meter goes, I don't care how easily a special name trips off the tongue, a certain amount of care and research has to be used in the what these babies will be named.Care must be taken so as not to chance naming a little one after a relative somewhere in the family that committed some type of faux pas some time ago.

The unlucky ancestor's misguided mistake could have been anything
from having been on the side of the invaders to having done time in Atlanta for not having been secretive about the location of the area's still. The crime would be in having been caught , as there is certainly no shame in making your own beverages even in the modern South.

Don't be mistaken to dream that only the names of a southern child's ancestors are treasured or even that their grandparents are the only ones handed down.
There may have been a valiant grandparent who served fiercely in the war and deserving of honor. In this situation there may be a competition every generation or so among siblings to have the first son. The reward for winning this rather odd contest will be that the first born son can have first dibs for the famous individual's name. Talk about chaos at family dinners!
How in the world can you differentiate between all those namesakes?

How would a mother manage a shout out to one of them without dragging in the entire clan? That's where middle names are so helpful and that brings me to a reason behind the southern tradition of double naming traditions!

As we all know southerners are famous for double names. Some are forced to resort to triple names so that their little Johnny and Sally stands apart from the rest. Why this is a tradition attributed to the south I'm not really certain. I would like to think it's that southerners have so many beloved kin that they want to honor. This fact makes it necessary to give each baby many names so that everyillustrious dead family member is sufficiently memorialized.

I can't count the many theories where credit can be given for the reasoning of traditional southern baby naming patterns and the traditions behind them. There seems to be no real answer on why family names and history seem to be more important to new parents in the south than in other regions of the country. There is however, no argument that the results are some of the most stately and romantic names you will find stamped on a birth certificate anywhere. The next time you feel tempted to laugh at a baby named something antiquated consider that the first person that bore the same name may not have died defending a southern lady's honor but that he may have died defending our freedom and our country.

Jan Bay is a Freelance Author of Nursery Decorating Articles Baby Gear Reviews and Webmaster for www.unique-baby-gear-ideas.com Use of this article requires an active link to Popular Baby Names

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