I have a question about naming babies. If you name a baby after someone, do they take on that person's traits?
In our situation, my husband's grandmother recently passed away. She was an awesome women, was vital with regard to raising him and was wonderful with our other two children. This is why we would like to honor her. However, she had a little problem with holding grudges. She was not on speaking terms with any of her siblings at the time of her death and had only recently started talking to her oldest child after many years of no communication.
We are considering using her name for our 3rd child (due June 10th). We will for sure use it as a middle name and that part doesn't worry me. But for some reason, using it as a first name makes me worry that our daughter will somehow take on her negative character traits.
So, what do you and your readers think? Will our daughter take on her traits if we use her name? Can we counter act it by using a middle name like Mercy or Grace?
It seems like this is a question that falls into the same category as "Does everyone born in the same range of dates have the same personality, which can be represented by a horoscope symbol?": some people will say no, and some people will say yes, and many will have anecdotes supporting their position. But in my own opinion, if you are asking if a name has the magical property to carry traits from its previous owner and change a child's personality and make it different than the personality the child would have had with a different name, I'd say no, I don't believe it does.
(This is not to say that a child named, say, Phatty, won't be altered by that experience. But here we are talking about the name as trait-carrier from its previous holder ((and not just ANY previous holder but the specific one the parents are thinking of when they choose the name)), traits that would presumably be carried even in a vacuum apart from the societal experience that can come with a particular name.)
Every person has some good traits and some bad ones, and so EVERY namesake name is associated with some good traits and some bad ones. We generally give namesake names to honor another person (even realizing that he or she, like everyone else, is flawed), and to call that person to mind when we think of the name, and maybe even as a way to highlight certain traits we HOPE the child will have (as we might when we name a child Faith, or Serenity, or Lincoln, or Darwin)---but the name is not itself a magic spell that needs to be counteracted with other name spells.
In this case, however, it sounds as if your idea could help smooth over any family feelings that might be called up by your use of the name. You could say with rueful affection, "We named her after grandma who meant so much to us---but we used the middle name Mercy, because grandma always struggled with that." Not as a spell, but as a way to call to mind the trait of mercy, as you call to mind the grandmother you'd like to honor. On the other hand, deliberately using a middle name to counteract the first name may only serve to continually remind people of the grandmother's bad traits, which otherwise might gradually be forgotten.
