Her Name

Claire Annalise

A reader emailed me yesterday to ask how we came up with Claire's name. As you all know, I had some difficulty with girl names. After reading through various top 200 and other name lists, JP and I just didn't like many (or as it seemed at the time, any) female names. After occasionally seizing on one only to immediately reject it because I didn't like the nicknames that went with it, or I thought it was too common, or one of us had a bad association with it, JP quit and decided we could name our baby after she was born. I thought that was a terrible idea- it wasn't like we had a list of possibilities, we had nothing, and I didn't see how her squished little pink face was going to inspire a name out of thin air. Finally I picked the only potential name on our list and said she was going to be Claire unless he could come up with something better.

At first we kept saying we were thinking of other options, but the more we used it, the more we liked it- and the more the baby in my belly seemed to be Claire. I had first fallen in "like" with the name when I was pregnant with Landon. It fit all my requirements- not overly common but not unusual, easily pronounced, easily spelled, and no shortened nickname possibilities. It sounded pretty, but strong, and I could see a little girl and a successful woman sharing the name. I think it must have been the Diana Gabaldon Outlander books that first gave me the idea. The Claire in those books is a very smart, strong character and that was part of the mental picture I had of my future daughter. So Claire it was. Like Landon, the biggest reason we chose it was because we liked it, and it didn't go too much deeper than that.

Also like Landon, her middle name has more meaning. My middle name was Ann. I never liked it, so I switched it out with my maiden name once I married JP, but I've grown a little more fond of it in the five years since then. Ann is my mom's middle name as well as her aunt's and her great-grandmother's, and it happens to be my dad's sister and mother's middle names too. But the real reason for including "Anna" in Claire's middle name comes from my Swedish grandpa. He has always loved the name Anna Brita. Each time one of his four children announced they were having a baby, my grandpa would so hopefully suggest Anna Brita, "the most beautiful name in the world." It became something of a joke, but after he struck out with each of his 10 grandchildren, he still persevered with the suggestion for his great-grandchildren. It wasn't until recently, when he and my grandmother took a trip to Nova Scotia, that I learned the story behind his persistent suggestion: Anna Brita was the name of his grandmother. In 1888, when she was 23 and approximately 7 months pregnant, she boarded a ship with her husband and 20-month old son (my grandpa's dad), to sail from Sweden to America. There were many stops along the way and at some point she became very ill and went into labor.

From the Acadian Reporter, May 4, 1888, "from there was taken . . . to the Samaritan House the sick wife of Karl P. Norden, an emigrant. When off the coast of Newfoundland the wife was confined, and her position among several hundred of emigrants was not at all conducive to comfort. After being taken to the Samaritan House she grew rapidly worse; last evening Rev N. LeMoine baptized the little stranger, and shortly after the mother, aged 23, died. The husband aged about 30, and a little boy, and the baby, which is not expected to live are left." The baby girl died two days after her mother, and they are buried in separate numbered, but not named, pauper's graves outside Halifax (A-23 and A-90). My great-great-grandfather and his 20-month old son continued on to America alone. The story made me cry when I first read it in the email my grandpa sent out after his visit to her grave, and it's making me cry now, but the happy ending is that the two of them did make it to America. And many years later, 20-month-old baby Carl was a grown man with a farm in Siren, Wisconsin, a wife, and 8 children, the youngest of whom is my grandpa.

So, Anna was to be part of her name. The second part comes from my grandmother's mom, Alesa Isabella Christina Anderson, who spent her whole life thinking her name was Alice, only to find out many years later, I believe when she was filing for social security and finally saw her birth certificate, that her name was actually the Swedish Alesa. Back then most of the immigrants wanted to embrace their new American identities, so baby Alesa had become Alice and she never knew it. Thus, Claire's middle name of Annalise.

I think "Claire" suits her, and I love it more and more as she grows into it. I think she likes it too.