Perhaps you’ve seen the Time name generator that tells you what you would have been named based on the popularity of your name the year you were born.
Today I invite you to share the story of your name. I’m not sure how true the story is, but my parents always told me that when they were Up North (that’s Michigan for Upper Peninsula) a few months after their wedding, they were fishing on vacation. My mom wasn’t feeling well, and couldn’t figure out why. Supposedly my grandma took one look at her and said, “I know what’s wrong with you!”
And so I was named Wendy Sue because it was “windy at the Soo” when my parents figured out they were having me.
How about you? What’s the story behind your name?
Great story! A “sounds-like story” similar to my husband’s: his father, named Russell, grew up in China as a child of missionaries; in Chinese, his name was Ren-Lee, so my husband was named Ronald Lee in a rather nifty re-anglicization. My own naming is mostly about a discarded name: I was named Martha Sue because my mom thought a friend’s daughter’s name – Marty – was cute. Who knows what ever happened to that, because on the Christmas stocking Mom knit for my first Christmas (6 months old) I was immortalized as “Suzie.” Mom got all official when I entered kindergarten and, of course, enrolled me with my given name. As fate would have it, there was another Martha (what, no 3 other Sue/Suzanne/Susan variants?) and told the school to just call me Suzie since that’s how I was known at home. And so it’s been: Suzie – or the “more-grown-up” Sue – on a day-to-day basis, and Martha for purposes of official record. What a split-personality life, eh?