How To Choose a Name
How do you choose a name for an adopted child? Do you keep their birth name, change it entirely, give them a name representative of their culture or ethnicity, or do you allow them to chose?
For us choosing AJ’s name was easy. When we got his referral we loved his birth name and wanted to honor the name his birth parents gave him so we kept his first name. We added my father in-law’s first name as his middle name and soon realized that we had created AJ, a short and sweet initial name. It was never something we would have started out to do, especially if we had a biological child because we would have chosen something more trendy or spiritual or something that rolls off the tongue better with our last name.
But, for what its worth, AJ stuck and it is perfect for him. If there ever was a stereotypical AJ he is it…cute and sly, boisterous and bounding, sleuthy and charming, and energetic beyond anything.
For the Bebe…it was a little more difficult. We were not especially fond of the name his birth mother chose for him and we could not, for the life of us, find a Hispanic name we liked. We knew we wanted my father’s name in there somehow, either my father’s first name or his middle name so we played around with it for days and still nothing struck us like AJ’s did.
Until we learned the birth mother’s maiden name (maternal surname).
In Spanish (and Guatemalan) culture, names tie them to their families and their past.
The first surname is the paternal. The second is the maternal surname, or what we might call the mother’s maiden name. Therefore, if Juan Gomez Jimenez and Maria Vega Fernandez marry and have a son, Jose, he would be named Jose Gomez Vega.
Of equal importance to the Hispanic family researcher is the fact that an Hispanic woman never changes her name (thus, our son will ALWAYS have a tie to his birth mother and the reason we chose his first name).
How did you choose your children’s names?
For more stories on choosing names…
Tags: , Adoption, birth family, birth-mother, chosing, culture, ethnicity, namesRelated Stories
POSTED IN: AJ, Countries and Domestic, Guatemala, My Family, Reflection, Russia, The Bebe
3 opinions for How To Choose a Name
BMS
Mar 4, 2008 at 4:52 pm
For son #1, we kept his Guatemalan middle name, and added a first name we liked, and a second middle name after a grandfather. We would have kept his Gutatemalan first name, but it was just not easily pronouncible next to our last name. For son #2, his Guatemalan birth mother asked us to name him. So we gave him a first name we liked, one middle name after the other grandfather, and the birth mother’s father’s name as the second middle name.
Marcie
Mar 4, 2008 at 5:03 pm
B- that is really neat that your son’s birth mother asked you to name him. I hope that someday he will love to hear that story.
I absolutely love the name we ended up using (a derivative of his birth mother’s surname) and can’t wait to tell you all.
Thrifty Karen
Mar 10, 2008 at 5:17 pm
I guess it would depend upon what their given name is. If it is a nice name, then maybe keep it. If not, then maybe use it for their middle name and give him or her a new first name.
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