While Hannah gained the right to call herself an “official name expert” after completing her PhD in sociology with a dissertation on names and identity at UC Berkeley, her interest in names goes back as long as she can remember. As a kid, she collected baby name books, drew up long lists of names for future children, and pored over the birth certificates of every Cabbage Patch Kid in Toys ‘R Us. As a graduate student, she spent years analyzing American parents’ naming practices, reviewing data from Social Security Administration records as well as millions of California birth certificates, and conducting in-depth interviews with Bay Area families about how they chose their children’s names.
Both before and after completing her PhD, Hannah consulted many times with expectant friends, family, and colleagues, offering advice on everything from “what’s the most androgynous name in the Top 1000 this year?” to “how popular is this name for people like me?” to “help! My favorite name is too popular!” In 2017, she decided to make her services available to the public through Ipseity.
Although Hannah has been thinking about names and naming for many years, naming her own children was a whole different experience. Both her children have four names (one first, two middles, and a last), and Hannah and her husband chose legacy names (family names) from both sides of the family. Her daughter has a name that’s come down through her husband’s family for at least seven generations, but never been used for a girl before; her son has a name from Hannah’s family. Neither name is one that ever appeared on a list Hannah drew up as a kid, which just goes to show how the perfect name for an abstract kid can be very different from the perfect one for a real kid.
Some of Hannah’s favorite names are
- Girls: Sophia, Piper, Aurelia, Ruth, and Greta
- Boys: James, Walker, Colin, Dustin, and Dane