Names

Part of this post if for my mother-in-law, Marcia – she asked this week about Anna’s name – if it was family or not.  I realized in thinking about that question that I don’t know that I’ve ever "written down” how we came up with the names of our girls and I don’t doubt our girls would eventually like to know.  So, I thought I’d write a post about it.  Beware – it is not very exciting!  Heh!

Julia – Adam and I were in Oregon, driving down the highway and enjoying the view, on vacation in 2002 (after Adam graduated from college).  We started talking about names of kids… if we were to get married and have children, and that is when Julia Morgan was named.  Of all the names we discussed on that trip, it is one of the two that stuck and five years later, Julia was finally born!  Julia is named after my Great-Grandma Julia Rischette.  Morgan was simply a name that we liked that went with Julia.

Raven – We didn’t know if Raven would be a boy or a girl.  We had a boy name, but took some time to come up with a girl name.  We thought we had pegged a few, and then approximately two weeks before she was born, we were having the name discussion, and one of us (sadly I cannot remember which one) said, “Hey, what about Raven?”  About a week before she was born, it was narrowed down to Raven and Maria, and Adam gave me the choice to decide between the two.  The day we went to the hospital it was a mutual, “We know the name, right?”  And Raven was born.  Marie (her middle name) is after Adam’s grandma, Marie Bannach.

Anna – When we began vetting names this time around, we started with a new list of names yet again, but also knew that we wanted a family name in our next child’s name.  (I should say, the boy name stayed the same yet again – maybe someday we’ll have a boy?)  When Adam’s grandma Dolores Draeger passed away in December, I suggested to him that we should use Beyel (her maiden name) as a middle name if our baby was a girl.  We started looking at names that Beyel might sound good with; ironically, we landed on two names about a month out and Beyel wasn’t the middle name for either.  However, we weren’t comfortable or settled on either of those names, and our list of two went back to a list of 20.  A FB message session with a college friend (you know who you are!) popped Anna onto the list, and within a couple of weeks we were settled on Anna as a name.  And, lo and behold, we thought Beyel went great with it!  So to answer to the question as to whether Anna is a family name – not in how we came up with it.  However, because of the popularity of Anna in the early 20th century, it is easy to find a family member in both of our trees that had the name Anna.

As I said, not very exciting!  But that is the short story of how our girls were named.