What's In A Name?

During my pregnancy, we chose not to share the names we were considering. I was afraid someone might say something negative about a name we loved, with said negative comment burned in my memory forever. For example, the Christmas before Maisy was born, 2009, we had a very broad, general, spirited, and fun talk about names with Dave's family. His mom, Audrey, [foreshadowing!] commented that some name was "a washerwoman's name". Are there even washerwomen anymore? :-)


Margaret Margaret was my maternal great-grandmother. Her daughter Katherine was my grandmother. Katherine's daughter Susan Margaret is my mother. Marguerite was also Dave's paternal grandmother, and is his eldest sister.


Audrey As I so cleverly alluded to earlier, Audrey was Dave's mother. During the same spirited talk about names, she made very clear that she did not like her own name. We do! We hope she doesn't mind that we chose to honor her by using Audrey as Maisy's middle name. Dave's mom Audrey died March 17, 2010.


Maisy There are many ways to spell Maisy. We opted for M-a-i-s-y, finding it easy to say it's "like daisy, but with an M", or to refer to the cute children's book character, Maisy. We first heard the name Maisie on the British TV show Spooks (rebranded MI-5 here in the US), where it was the name of an adorable child character. Lucky for us, my baby name book said that Maisie/Mazie/Maisy is an old Scottish nickname for Margaret (or the Gaelic form Mairead).