Before I had left Thursday night, I told my wonderful wife that on the morrow, we would have to decide on a name for our son. She responded in the affirmative, and we decided to sleep on it and discuss it in the morning.
Well, by the time I got back to the hospital Friday morning, the birth certificate lady had already called Kelly three times. (She was persistent, if not annoying; she called a total of five times before we had made a decision.) Technically, you have five days to name your child in Texas, but we really didn’t want to wait that long. :)
So we began talking names.
Now we had been running a list of names for a couple of months prior. We had purchased a couple of baby name books, and had acquired a couple more from friends. We had read through them all at one time or another, picking names, discarding most of them, and narrowing our choices. Kelly even set up a poll at one point at BabyCenter to gauge public opinion. We wanted a name somewhat unique, but not weird, which vetoed some of my choices, like Thor, Odin, Dagmar, and others. ;)
The leading contenders were Noah, Nathan, Jonah, and Zachary. We also liked Matthew, Erik, and to a less degree, Mason, Cole, Jeremy, and Samuel. We played around with middle name combinations, too, including some family names.
It was during our discussion on Thursday afternoon, though, while waiting in the labor/delivery room, that a new name appeared, one we hadn’t considered. Our friend and neighbor Wendy had stopped by to visit and see if we needed anything, and asked about family names and middle names. Kelly and I really didn’t like too many of the middle names amongst our family members, but there was one that we did like: my father’s father’s middle name, Davis. I started putting it together with some of the first names on our list, and it fit well with some of them. Then Wendy said that Davis would be a great first name as well, something we had never given consideration to.
So we had slept on this decision Thursday night. We discussed our previous favorites, as well as the newcomer. Davis fit our criteria of somewhat unique, but not weird. It has personal family history behind it as well, as Kelly had grown to love my grandfather the way I did.
We had thrown Christopher in to the mix earlier on as a middle name for some of our leading contenders, and Kelly decided it was a good fit with Davis as well. So the decision was made, and Davis Christopher Turner was put on the birth certificate in short order.
According to Name Statistics, Davis is the #684 most common male name, and 0.01% of men in the U.S. are named Davis. They estimate that around 12,250 American men are named Davis. Turner, as it turns out, is the #44 most common last name, with about 0.152% of last names in the U.S. being Turner. This translates into approximately 380,000 Turners in the U.S.
You can add one more! :D
Posted by retrophisch at August 27, 2003 10:11 AM