What's in a necronym?

I’ve read several biographies of the Duke of Wellington that begin by listing certain superficial commonalities he shared with his great adversary, Napoleon. Both were born in 1769. Both were the product of island dependencies of the nations they’re most associated with--Napoleon of course was Corsican, while Wellington was Anglo-Irish. I’ve never seen a biography that mentioned the fact both men were christened with sibling necronyms, however.

In other words, both were given the same name as a dead brother.

As a woman of the 21st century, I can’t imagine doing such a thing. If, God forbid, anything happened to Miss Fraser, it would feel like the height of cruelty to both daughters to give another baby the same name--as if my second daughter wasn’t her own unique person but a replacement for her lost sister, and as if my first child could ever be replaced.

Obviously the Earl and Countess of Mornington and Carlo and Letizia Buonaparte didn’t feel the same way when they were naming their new sons back in the summer of 1769. I don’t think that’s because the higher infant mortality of the 18th century had inured them to grief at the loss of the first Arthur and Napoleone. Parents of the era before vaccinations and antibiotics were undoubtedly less shocked to lose a child than we would be today, but letters and journals of the era show the deep sorrow of fathers and mothers at the loss of babies and young children. Instead I think 18th century parents thought of names differently than we do today.

When Mr. Fraser and I named our daughter, we thought primarily of her future and our aspirations for her to be a happy, successful individual. We picked a name we believed sounded both beautiful and dignified. We tested its dignity by plugging it into the presidential oath of office and imagining how it would sound in the sentence, “And the Nobel Prize for medicine goes to...” (Or to put it another way, to me a good girl’s name is one that would sound better on a POTUS than on the pole.) We kept the nod to tradition and family heritage in her middle name, which is a feminine form of her paternal grandfather’s name.

But in the past, names were more about family connections than expressing your dreams for your unique Special Snowflake of a baby. Wellington was named for his maternal grandfather. Knowing that, it makes much more sense that his parents reused the name. If you name your second son Arthur to show him, his grandfather, and all the world that the connection matters to you and you want the name to live on in the family, of course if that boy dies, you’ll give the name to the next son born, hoping he’ll be more fortunate and live to pass the name on to sons and grandsons of his own, keeping the great chain of connections and heritage alive.

The Small Book of Regency Baby Names

I've often cracked, when naming characters in my novels, that the Big Book of Regency Baby Names is actually a slender pamphlet. And now I've got actual data to back that up. I'm reading a book called The British Army against Napoleon: Facts, Lists, and Trivia 1805-1815, by Robert Burnham and Ron McGuigan. It's pretty much as dry as it sounds, though the trivia interspersed with the lists is fun, and it's full of useful info to someone like me who's currently writing a novella set in the aftermath of Salamanca and a novel spanning Bussaco through Fuentes de Onoro.

The chapter on the life of an officer includes a list of the fifteen most common first names among British officers serving in the Peninsular War. They were:

John
William
James
Thomas
George
Charles
Robert
Henry
Edward
Richard
Alexander
Francis
Samuel
Joseph
Frederick

Just shy of three quarters of all the officers serving had one of those names, and over a quarter were named John or William.

As for their last names, here are the ten most common:

Campbell
Smith
Stewart
Jones
Fraser
Gordon
Hamilton
Scott
Thompson
Cameron

Very Scottish, and I'm betting I've got some extremely distant cousins among their number. (Yes, Fraser is a pen name, but it's on my family tree--the name I pull out at Highland gatherings whenever I run into the kind of people who want to check your pedigree before selling you a tartan scarf, and, yes, I really have met a few.)

I'd love to see an equivalent first name list for the wives and sisters of those officers. I'm guessing it'd include Jane, Catherine, Anne, Charlotte, Caroline, Sarah, Frances, and Mary for sure, but I'm not sure what would round out the top 15. Eleanor? Harriet? Lucy? I know Georgiana and Cassandra were in use (obviously--see the Duchess of Devonshire and Cassandra Austen), but I don't think they were that ubiquitous.

I try for realism in character names. I wouldn't limit myself to just those top 15--though TSL has William and AMOI James--but I'm name nerd enough to check the etymology of a name to make sure it's not too modern and sensitive enough to social nuances that I'm not going to give an English character a blatantly Celtic name, and if I picked anything really unusual I'd be sure to justify in my own mind, if not on the page itself, why that character's parents ventured off the John/William/James/Jane/Catherine/Anne beaten path.