they were family names. Samuel John, for two long-ago preachers on my side, and Elizabeth Rose, Elizabeth for both grandmothers and the whole thing for her great-frandmother who I adored, plus Elizabeth was a family name that went back on both sides of both our families for at least 200 years. Adam Scott was a bit of an outlier, but there was an Adam on my family tree, and Scott was for his godfather. We had no idea that Adam would become so popular. Still, we wanted names that would sound as good when they were 50 as when they were little.
The popularity thing happened with my real first name, which I hate and never use, although I would have made peace with it had my parents used the Scottish nickname for it, which is Jenny. But they didn't. So I adopted my nickname from a baby name that came out of nowhere, "Jillybelle".
When an online friend was pregnant the first time and going through this nonsense, I suggested she go back a hundred years and look at names that were popular then and choose from those. She did, and as a result their first daughter was named Mary Helen. Being a southern girl, she was called by both names, but when she started babbling and couldn't get it all out right herself, it became "Mellie", so she is Mellie to friends and family. When her siblings were born, they went through the same process and chose the names Dorothy Ann, who is now Dory, and Richard James, who is Richie to the family but prefers to be Richard.
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