My name is ...

I was chatting to my niece today, and out of idle curiosity I asked her why she and her husband had decided on the name Benedict for their son. It’s an unusual name, and not one that’s cropped up in the family before, and we tend to be fairly traditional when it comes to names, with children tending to be named after a grandparent or thereabouts. The names always skip at least one generation to avoid confusion. One brother’s children are Thomas and Charlotte, and those were the names of our 4-greats grandparents. The Boy is named after my father, who was named after his grandfather. Previous surnames are generally included as Christian names too: my great-grandmother had one ‘girl’s’ name and three ‘surnames’ in her baptismal name. There have been umpteen Roberts and Jameses and Charleses and Johns, so to throw in a Benedict (though his middle names are his father’s and grandfather’s names) was quite an unusual thing to do. The child was very lucky at his Christening though, because for some reason the vicar wanted to name him Beatrice, which would have made his life unnecessarily challenging. Oddly enough, Beatrice is the name of my aunt, and her grandmother, so under different circumstances it wouldn’t have been too bad.

Why Benedict? Good old BBC. My Godson is named after Benedict Allen, one of my niece's explorer heroes.