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Long before I had kids, I’ve been fascinated with names, their origins and how people come up with names for their kids. When I was cleaning my bookshelves, I couldn’t believe how many books of names I had. These are not baby name books, but books about their histories and meanings.

When I meet people who have unusual or uncommon names, I often ask about it. Some were family names, some were a mix of two people’s names, some were made up… my kids and I were all named after relatives who passed. I was named after my dad’s grandfather, Max. So if I were of the male persuasion, you’d be calling me Max. My older two were named after my maternal grandparents.

My middle child’s middle name came from Paul’s grandmother as he was born on her birthday. When my youngest arrived, thankfully no one had passed on to name him after. So we picked his name because we loved the name and his middle name is my mother’s maiden name. It also honors my maternal grandfather’s sister. She had no kids of her own, but I didn’t know her well. I was going to name him after her, but my mom was an only child… so we decided to use the maiden name to carry on the family name.

I got most of the books before the Internet became what it is today. Before the launching of sites on the topic. I couldn’t recommend one specific site as a favorite. They all have their strengths and weakness. Plus, a name might appear in only a couple of sites while those sites missed names that others have.

So rather than writing about one site, I provided a list and a short description of the various sites.

• NameVoyager is an impressive site as it gives you a “sea” of names. Edward Tufte would be proud. It requires Java to run. When you enter it, you’ll see what looks like an sea level map of different hues of blues and reds. Type in a name or scroll your mouse over the “sea.” This is a “must check out” site and probably the most unique of the name sites. “Meryl” broke the top 1000 names in the ’50s. Except for the mispronunciations and being referred to as a male, having an uncommon name has its good points.
• Social Security Online: Popular Baby Names - Paul and I used this site to search for names for kid #3 as (thankfully) we didn’t have anyone to name him after except my grandfather’s sister, but we honored her by giving our son my mother’s and hers maiden name for a middle name. Look up the popularity of a name by the year all the way back to 1879! It also lists the top five names by state and top 1000 names by decade. We were thinking about the name Brynn for a girl, and I worried it was too uncommon and hard to hear as “rynn” is softly pronounced. No matter, we had a delightful, curly-haired boy who is two now.
• Babyzone Baby Names - includes features and tools such as the top names, baby naming traditions, baby name basket (for saving names you find for later reference), and name inventor, a wizard that generates name suggestions. I clicked on “Girl Names” and got: Quanen, Xaler, Carl (I have yet to meet a girl named Carl), Ctitan, Nentyn, and Mad (!? - I don’t think that’s a good idea - maybe that’s how the mom felt at the time of birth?).
• NameTraq - searches surnames in the news. I picked Kaplan and most of the results were articles written by someone whose last name is Kaplan or a Kaplan mentioned in the article.
• Babies Named a Bad, Bad Thing - not the prettiest site, but one that have you laughing hard. I’ve seen unusual names and impossible to spell names on the Social Security Online, but these beat ‘em all.
• Institute for Naming Children Humanely - Because of people naming their kid like those found in the previous site, someone decided to stand up for those babies!
• Name Statistics - is about numbers as it tells about the popularity of names.
• Think! Baby Names - search the baby names list, check out the popular names, and click on the letter you want the name to start with. The search tool allows you to search boy or girl, name prefix, name suffix, and meaning. A majority of the names sites have these types of features.
• Parenting: Baby Namer is hard to find, but has a different approach to names. Its resource comes from Baby Names Now: From Classic to Cool—The Very Last Word on First Names by Linda Rosenkrantz, Pamela Redmond Satran, both greater writers who have released more books on baby names. This site provides names in the categories of celebrities, cool trends, global favorites, unisex, classics, and so on.

Not only we do have sites that act like a dictionary or history book into names, but also sites listing names for a specific culture. Here are a few:

• Hebrew Names
• Mormon
• Irish
• Islamic and Muslim
• Indian
• Greek

I did not overlook African, Italian, Spanish and others. The top results of these were part of large baby name Web sites rather than specific for those cultures. If you know of one, comment away. Still want more??? Knock yourself out.