How many members of your family have the same first name?

Question:

How many members of your family have the same first name?

If your answer is more than 2, could you then answer the following question: http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/ind...

Thank you.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: At the nuclear family-level four--my parents, born in 1920 and 1925 respectively, didn't have a lot of imagination--or else were very traditional--and named both my brother and me after themselves. This didn't cause a lot of problems when I was growing up since family and friends called me by my middle name. This practice didn't seem all that unusual at the time either because many of my friends growing up shared their name with a mother or father.

Similarly, my maternal grandparents named their oldest daughter, Mary, and son, David, after themselves while my father was named after his own father, although my grandparents inserted the last name of their minister as his middle name. Curiously, however, he wasn't the first-born son, who, in this case, was name after my grandmother's father--an old Southern custom.

Actually the practice of naming the first-born son after the father makes a lot of sense when tracing a family tree. Take my maternal grandmother's mother's family, the McQuerrys, for example. Her father William (1834-1909) named his first-born son William (b. 1863); William's father was named Charles, and he was the second son. Charles (1802-1866) also had a first-born son named Charles, but he named his second-born son, the above-mentioned William (1834-1909) after his father, William (1765-32). This William was a second-born son; the first born, John (1764-1832), was named after his father John (1707-1790) who, in turn, was named after his father, John (1683-1755). The John born in 1707 changed his name from Macquarrie to McQuerry upon coming to America (from Eigg, Inverness, Scotland--one of the Inner Hebrides), but because of the family's almost religious adherence to traditional Scottish-naming practices for over 250 years, I can be reasonably sure that I am a 9th generation descendant of the John who lived from 1683 to 1755. By the way, a good many of the first-born daughters were named after their mother, whose name was usually Mary.

I've also noticed that my maternal grandmother's father's family followed an almost identical naming scheme. Since my great-grandfather was a first-generation, Irish-Catholic American, I presume his family was following tradition: Bernard and Patrick Doughertys go back in time for at least five generations. Again, the oldest daughter is usually named Mary after her mother.

Of course, my brother threw tradition out the window and broke the chain.