Thursday, May 2, 2013

what's in a name

We had so many people ask us how we chose the name for our baby boy so I just thought I'd share with all of you also!

When it came to picking out names, I had a running list of baby name ideas on my phone since probably before we got married. If we were having a girl, we would have used a name that we've both loved since the day we got married. The boy name was giving us some problems though. I had several "cute" names listed, but none of them really stuck out to either one of us. A few months before I got pregnant (my most recent "baby fever" days), I was browsing the internet for boy names - again, because I felt we were destined to have a boy - and I came across the name Crew. I loved it. I thought for sure there was no way that Will would ever go for this name though. Will is a traditional kind of guy. He likes old-fashioned things. MUCH to my surprise, he loved the name too! I couldn't believe it. 

Ok, fast forward to becoming pregnant and the name game begins. We had to choose a middle name for our sweet Crew. The day that we told Will's family that we were pregnant, one of the first questions was, "Are you going to name him William?" At first we said no. (And kept saying no until two days before the party actually!)

Side note: I had been searching thebump and babycenter for name ideas and came across a message board that was discussing the name Crew. About 95% of everyone who commented said that it was an awful name and 'why would anyone ever name their kid that?' Usually something like this would have convinced me to instantly choose another name, but that just shows how much I still loved it. AND that message board was in 2009-2010....soooo 3 years ago!

Every middle name we came up with just didn't "flow" with Crew as the first name. It was so frustrating! There were a lot of names that sounded good with Crew as the middle name, but we didn't want that. We wanted him to have Crew as his first name and go by his first name. 

Last Thursday night, our ultrasound day, we were at dinner discussing names. We had already given Kelly the envelope with the gender in it so she was waiting on the name decision from us so she could prepare the name reveal chalkboard for the party too. We had been going back and forth a thousand times on whether or not we were going to use William or not. I asked Will if he wanted the baby's name to have William in it if he were a boy...and he said it didn't matter to him. Still getting nowhere with deciding, I asked him by approaching the question differently. "Say we have all boys one day, would it be important and meaningful to you that one of them has William in their name?" And he said yes. Finally! A decision has been made. That only took forever. Men.
And so his name would be Crew William Kassner


Side note #2: Before our gender reveal party on Saturday, I really regretted telling people that we were going to do the name reveal then too. I take things very personally and am so sensitive to what others are thinking so I was dreading revealing the name we had picked out. Crew is definitely not a "normal" name so I was scared that when we pulled the paper off the chalkboard that I would see people making faces at it. Actually, I don't think I even looked at all 60 of our friends and family standing there because I didn't want to see it if they made a face! Luckily, everyone was so supportive of our name choice. Whew!

I'll admit, I've never been one to care too much about carrying on family names, but something about thinking about our son and the meaningfulness of William in his name kind of makes me a little emotional! (Blame it on the hormones!) Of course, his daddy is a William...and if our baby gets just his daddy's character alone I will be so thankful. He's got a great role model to look up to!

But does the name William go past just my husband's name? Ohhh boy, does it!

First of all, my dad's first name is William...another great "William" for Crew to look up to!...and he's quite the jokester too!
My maternal great grandfather was Willie, or Dadaw as we called him! (If you remember, I got my tattoo in memory of my great grandmother, Willie's wife...aka Mamaw) So you already know I've got such an emotional connection thinking about Mamaw and Dadaw. 

Now onto Will's side of the family. 
(I'm mostly typing this out in case we ever lose the actual piece of paper with the family history on it...at least it'll be on the blog!)

William F. Baker, born 1789
interesting fact: William F. bought 800 acres of land in 1848 on what is now Lamar Ave. in Memphis
William Rufus Baker, (son) born sometime between 1810-1820
William Robert Baker, (nephew of William Rufus) born sometime between 1860-1865
William Franklin Baker, (grandson of William Robert) born 1918
William Elton Baker, (son of William Franklin; my husband's maternal grandfather) born 1941
William Elton, Jr., born 1964
William Stephen Kassner, (my husband; William E. Jr.'s nephew) born 1988
Crew William Kassner, coming 2013

Wow, that's over 2 centuries of William's in the family. Amazing!

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11 comments:

  1. I love the history behind the name! I love Crew, too! It's unique but it's strong and masculine. You don't always see that in some of the trendy boy names. Great choice! :)

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  2. Oh wow, what a lineage of Williams! I love it! And you know, I love the meaning of the name William. For a long time it was at the top of our future baby name list.

    And I think Crew is a sweet name. It doesn't sound unusual at all to me, but then most of our friends haven't named their kids "traditional" names so maybe that's why. For example, some of our friends' kiddos are named: Cadence, Knox, Nolan, Asher, Hadley, Ezra, Scout, Brody, and Paisley. :)

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  3. I loooooooooooooooove the name Crew!!!

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  4. Wow! That's so awesome that your dad's name is William and you guys have so many from Will's side. I love the name William and really pushed for it to be Elliott's name...still working on it for a middle name lol. Everyone asked us where Elliott came from...I was the same as you--always had a "list" but when we actually got pregnant, it was so much harder for boys names. We have had our girl name for forever so hopefully someday we'll get to use it :)

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  5. This is awesome! How cool you have the history! I know it's tough but you just have forget any critical opinion. We have a daughter named Cole. Not Nicole, just Cole. It's a family name and we have the full history, as well. If I'd had a son his name would not have been Cole, Cole was our girl name. Anyway, Crew is a fantastic and unique name!

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  6. So I'm just being nosy and curious, but did y'all consider William Crew? It's def a Southern thang to call a child by their middle name, so we see it a lot. And I have to convince my hubby of the kids' names I've had picked out since I was 14 when that time comes.

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  7. I absolutely LOVE the name Crew -- LOVE IT. It is just an adorable, handsome name that will fit a baby all the way up to an adult man. I think it's perfect, and I love the long line of Williams, too!

    I know what you mean, though. We got such a headache from our families and friends over Ethan's name and our girl name, should we have had a girl. It's like everyone in the world thought we needed their input when selecting a name! When I said "Ethan Nicholas is a boy --" my dad actually said "YUCK!" Naturally, I bawled, haha. To this day, he swears he never said that and loves the name because our Ethan is perfect! ;) Our future kids names, both boy and girl, are a lot less traditional than even Ethan's name, so I worry about telling our families. But good for you! Maybe by having it at the gender reveal party, everyone will know it's said and done and not say anything?

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  8. So interesting! We're still trying to come up with our names and decide on things we really like.

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  9. I love the history behind it and still just love the name! :) We aren't sharing the name until the baby is born, mainly because I don't want to hear peoples opinion! I am so glad you had a good experience with it!!

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  10. i love the name!! and love that it is a family name too! choosing a name is so hard - we still aren't 100% about ours - it is a lot of pressure to pick a name! i love the one you picked!

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  11. I am just all over your blog today - LOL! I feel the same way about name reveals. We know what the middle name will be if it's a boy and I thought we had a first name picked out, we both really loved the name but once we told the family and my father in law said something, all of a sudden the Hubs didn't like the name anymore! It was kind of frustrating but I think we have some other great names in the line up. We did decide to keep the name to ourselves, possibly until birth - ha!

    Runt
    runtspickins@yahoo.com
    www.runtspickins.wordpress.com

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