Malcom

Originally my husband and I decided to honor our respective ancestral cultures— a scotch/Irish name for my family and a German one for his. But this posed a problem, we hated the German names. We disliked most names due to bad associations. We wanted something novel enough to make him the only one in his class with the name and common enough it wouldn’t cause issues with pronunciation or spelling. Eventually we settled on the name Malcolm. We loved it for its lineage but even more so that no one in either of our families had ever had the name. This meant that our son could live without expectation. We decided in the end his first name was to be his so he could make his own mark but his second was to be for a relative to relate him with those that came before. For this we settled on my dad’s name. As luck would have it, dad and my son are super similar people and look alike. We chose well.

Anonymous, St. Paul, MN