My strong preference is for first, 1 middle, and last, but two middles are all right with me. I’ve even considered using two if I have a daughter, as a sort of quiet connection to my mother (she has two herself).
Anything more than two middles and the result begins to sound less like a person’s name and more like someone just reciting a name list, but to each their own.
I agree that anything more than two middles is too much. That said, I’m a little annoyed by the constant emphasis on these being family names. TBH, I would use the names of important professors, mentors, and friends before I used names from my family tree. Mother and sister aside, my biological family isn’t that important to me. We’re not close. They’re just people I happen to be related to. I want my kids to have names that honor the ones I love most, not the ones I share some random genes with.
Also, while I’m all about meaningful names, there’s also nothing wrong with giving your child a name because you just like the way it sounds.
I’d say it’s cultural differences. Personally I find having more than 1 middle name ridiculous. Makes me think of upper class snobs as many people in power choose to do that, so it’s a BIG turn off for me. However i’m also American and it’s very unusual here for anyone to have more than 1 first, middle and last name. Sometimes I come across someone with 2 last names, hyphenated because they are married and generally in a big business job so they didn’t want to get rid of their maiden name but still tacked on their husband’s last name to the end. I’ve never heard of 2 last names on a man or for any other reason.
All this could just be me and my area though.
Augusta_Lee- I think the phrase “family names” is just shorthand for “names that hold great significance to one or both parents.” My brother is named after a family friend. I would consider that to be a “family” name because he was named after a good friend of my dad’s. My mom thought about naming me after her best friend’s mother(ended up going in a different direction), and I would have felt like it was a family name, and I’m actually considering using the name for a girl myself. Sometimes it’s just easier to say “family names” rather than listing out everyone who is significant to you. Especially if you aren’t close to your family, then those names of friends, mentors, etc., are definitely the equivalent to family names.
In general, I actually quite like the “It’s a family name” explanation for odd name choices. Once the name is on the child… ta da! The child is in your family, so their name is a family name, even if it’s never appeared on your family tree before! My name has an archaic spelling, and I’ve sometimes told people that it’s a family name to get them to stop harassing me about it(I’m talking about ostensibly professional adults).
I think it is contextual. I didn’t ever really contemplate naming my kids with more than one middle name…then I married a [name_m]German[/name_m] with a four word, formal surname (the first two words are titles and technically part of his middle names in [name_f]Canada[/name_f]) and a distinct family history of having three given names (first + two middles). I think that pattern matched best the formality and significant history of his family’s name. Our daughter has a first name, plus two middles, plus her surname which contains four words (the first two are technically middles in [name_f]Canada[/name_f] but form part of the surname in Germany). My mother-in-law was born working/middle class [name_m]German[/name_m], as our two Au Pairs have been, and none of them have any middle names. We’ve had no issues with our daughter’s name and I love it as much as when I named her.
For me the first name is a name I love, one middle name is a name I really like and want to use, and a second middle name is to honor family.
I think 3 names is pushing it. Like 2 first + 1 mn, or 1 first + 2 mn or what have you. For the longest time, I never heard of multiple names, except for when I had to do some research for history and learned about how royalty often give a long string of names. I’m gonna say that around 98% of the people I know have: fn, mn, ln. Recently, some girls in my neighborhood back home chose to give their kids 2 middles.
When I met my boyfriend’s family, I was taken aback because all the kids have multiple names. His sister has 2 fn and 1 mn. His older brother has 4 names total (not sure what the split of fn/mn are) and goes by a shortened version of one of his middle names. My boyfriend has 1 first name and 2 middles. His younger brother has 5 names total, and goes by at least two different names, depending on who is talking to him. Their mom had a hard time deciding between her favorites for each kid, so she would just tack them all on. It confuses the heck out of me.
Personally, I wouldn’t do more than two middles unless you have strong family heritage of doing so (ie: the royals!). Two can sometimes seem a bit pretentious, and anything more than two definitely does, at least to me.
My family has a tradition of naming the oldest child with two middles, the next child with three, the third child with four etc., but as long as it’s a tasteful choice, I don’t think more that one or two middle names could be considered excessive.
I am fine with 2 mn, in fact I even like double barrel middle names, but I top out at 3, even with them being short. [name_m]Even[/name_m] if a name is long, it’s still somehow more concise and cleaner to say a long name than several short names, and I feel it’s because of the breaks in between the names creates a pause, and saying a name becomes less melodious and more like a machine gun firing. I contend that [name_f]Maryanne[/name_f] [name_f]Jane[/name_f] [name_u]Lou[/name_u] feels shorter to say than [name_f]Ann[/name_f] [name_f]Jane[/name_f] [name_f]Mary[/name_f] [name_u]Lou[/name_u]. [name_f]Ann[/name_f] [name_f]Jane[/name_f] [name_f]Mary[/name_f] [name_u]Lou[/name_u] feels like a singing warmup.