Once Upon a Time Baby Names

The good folks over at Crestleaf.com, a genealogy site, have worked on ranking the most popular surnames-turned-first-names currently being used. Shown above are the five most popular surnames given to boys and girls, as current as 2013. Here are the following current rankings: 1. Mason #4 2. Jackson #16 3. Carter #32 4. Hunter #36 5. Landon #39 1. Madison #9 2. Avery #12 3. Harper #16 4. Riley #45 5. Mackenzie #62 If you enjoyed this, please visit Crestleaf.com's statistics on the 25 most popular names from the 1960's.  *edit - Sorry, this site no longer exists. 

Hania (HAN-yah, HAH-nee-uh) is a Hebrew variation of Chania/Channah, meaning "resting place; grace of the Lord" and also a Polish diminutive of Hannah, meaning "grace, gracious." Hannah is an Old Testament name which became Anna in the New Testament. Chania is also a city in Crete which the Greeks called Kydonia, meaning "quince." Spelled Haniya this name is taken to mean "to be happy." There are a few namesakes for Hania - most recently Vin Diesel chose this name for his daughter, but also Polish pop singer Hania Stach, English actress Hania Barton (sister to Mischa), and Hania Mufti, a human rights activist from Jordan. In the Bible this was the name of the mother of the prophet Samuel. Hannah was a childless woman who prayed to God for children and was then blessed with six of them. Samuel became a warrior and judge of Israel. The name Hannah was not used regularly until after the Protestant Reformation, but it was favorited by the Puritan

Now that my son is here, I've decided to post my list of runners-up - the names that didn't quite make the cut. I'll try to keep this list as short as possible by only including the most recent or meaningful choices, since I've considered hundreds of names over the years. Any of the names you're about to see would have been great choices for our family, but didn't win out against our top name, which did not start out as our favorite but turned out to be the only one that looked good on him. Since I am so indecisive, I researched all of these names, made lists of possible sibling pairings, and wrote my top names down over and over again, constantly re-evaluating. One thing we did not do was ask for opinions on our top names or tell people what we had on our list, because we didn't want reactions to sway our decision one way or the other (partly because after sharing only one name early on, I immediately fell out of love with it). Other criteria: I had to be