I hadn’t thought about that but makes me wonder if it will become more common since not taking your husbands name has become more common. I wouldn’t think so, but I’m pushing 50 and can’t think of ever meeting a female named after her mom so if it shows up at all in the data that would be interesting.

Funny enough, I think it’s common for the female middle name to be a mom/grandma/aunt name.

Doesn't everyone do that? My brother has a grandparents name as his middle. I never thought of it as a gendered tradition

Is it a specific cultural thing I wonder

Possibly. I’ve just heard it more with girls and wouldn’t expect it’s evenly common on relative basis but certainly could be wrong

All the men on my dad's side of the family have the same middle name, with just a different first name.

It's apparently not an uncommon tradition in several areas of the world to either have either the first or middle name be shared, and then a unique name for the unmatched one (e.g. John Alan Doe, John James Doe, John Matthew Doe - Alan John Doe, James John Doe, Matthew John Doe).

My children have no middle name, and neither did I or my brother.

Eastern Europe of the Slavic variety enters the chat with a concept of patronymics. Nobody asks you if you want to have a middle name, it's always a deriative of your father's, by law.

My son was born in a country with doesn't write those in a birth certificate. When we went back, guess what -- they still added it by deriving it from my name.

My guess is no, because carrying the family legacy is falling out of fashion as much as taking the husband's name, maybe even more so.

Family legacy is quite obsolete in modern society.

Not every society wants to be modern.

Modern society cuts family ties which is a lot of times not so great, but on the other hand it saves lots of people from abusive relationships.

Once you can leave abusive parents or siblings, whole world of opportunities opens. Then again on the other hand not everyone can deal with such a freedom.

Yet still I am personally supportive of modern approaches where people can choose their destiny and not being tied to a family legacy.

At least in France, it means the father leaves and the kid doesn't have enough money to study — and we're transitioning to the workplace providing the funding for studies (apprenticeships where the company pays 10k€ per year, empoverishing the worker).

I'd rather see the name of the father be stuck to the kid so if he's a failure, everyone knows who failed him.

We will probably find out very soon why humans organized the way they did for millennia before we decided to change everything.

Please don't vaguepost on hn. It's hard to guess if this is an attack or a defense of the nuclear family (us other commenters would have to guess if you know how recent that phenomenon is).

Therefore, you just invite confusing answers and useless discussions in your reply.

To me, it's very clear GP was writing in support of traditional values, of which nuclear family is one.

Please don't gatekeep hn posts. Comments with little interests will receive little replies and others will rise. You adding a reply helps the post you dislike rise over others.

The idea of surnames is an anthropologically recent tradition. Humans living in small communities had no practical need for multiple names. Surnames mostly arise in societies with relatively strong centralized states so that the government has an easier time tracking its citizens.

That is a bit cliché isn't it? According to INSEE in France 12% of the kids were in shared custody and that is the mean. At 10 y old it is around 15%. And around 24% of the fathers get full custody.

So while there is a bias towards mother custody of the kids (around 2/3), there is still 1/3 of the kids where it is not the case.

Also, not having full custody of kids doesn't mean the father is leaving completely from the kids life. More often than not the kids need to stay with one parent because job and cost of living forces them to be more regionally apart (only 37% of kids living in same town). That doesn't mean the father do not see the kids in the weekends/holidays nor contribute financially to study.

So the reality is way more nuanced than you make it out to be in a small comment.

But then if a child succeeds despite whatever failure his father was he is stuck with that looser name.

Why not have him take the Maiden name so everyone can know the mother who failed him?

Why do you frame it as only fathers can fail children? Or only men can do wrong? Women can pay for studies as well, and have just as much duty to their children.