First names

The annual list of most popular baby names has just been released by the Department of Internal Affairs. The old-fashioned and Biblical names are clearly still trendy with modern parents - Jack, James, Joshua, Daniel and William for boys and Sophie, Olivia, Emma, Charlotte and Emily for girls. Good to see that none of the mis-spelled variants that I see so often in the local birth notices (Shavaughn, Makayla) are in wide-spread use - are these people trying to be different or are they just plain ignorant? Anyway, I've been on a baby name quest myself lately, trying to figure out why William and Sarah called their second-born Oscar. It might seem like a suitably old-fashoned name, but it turns out that in 1842, Oscar was not even remotely trendy. There weren't any great literary Oscars, no well-known public figure Oscars, and definitely no family Oscars that I can find. There weren't even any Oscars in Wellington in 1842, not among the jury-qualified, electoral-franchise-holding males. The occasional Oskar turns up amongst the Scandinavian immigrants, but I can't see any connection to my family.


So, as my Mum asked, why does it matter to me to know why my great-grandfather was named Oscar? To tell Sarah's story, I've got a bunch of facts (including the names of all the kids) but the bare, discoverable facts alone aren't the whole story. If I've got to write fiction in the gaps between the facts, it has to be logical fiction - it has to be appropriate to the context of the time, the place, the people. It has to matter - and things like baby name choices matter a great deal to parents, in 1842 and 2008. There's a lot of thought put into it, usually a fair bit of debate and discussion. Logically, this happened when William and Sarah chose names for each of their children - Ovid certainly wasn't named for some forebear; and Gertrude was definitely named after the ship that carried the family to Wellington. They chose Oscar for a reason, and while I can figure out the likely story behind Ovid and Gertrude, I'm stumped on Oscar. (And after that I've got Horace, Emma, Walter, Kate, Zoe, Alice and Sidney to go!)