The naming

Few moments in life are more consequential than giving a child a name, whether it's whispered in a delivery room or awarded with the pomp and anointment of a church christening. A name is the most public of the bundle of signifiers making a child unique.

Sometimes naming is easy—a kid will be a Junior or a III (inevitably "Tripp"), or will be named after a late grandparent or favorite uncle or aunt.

Just a few generations back it wasn't so easy in my extended family, because children came early and just kept coming. My paternal grandfather Eli had a huge family with many brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and he and his first wife Rosa had six kids before she died in the flu epidemic of 1918. Similarly, my father's mother Elvira had numerous brothers and sisters and she and her husband Lee had six kids before her husband died of malaria.

Once those two widowers came together, they proceeded to have five more children, four of whom made it to adulthood.

In this very large branch of our family tree were plenty of sturdy common names—James, William, Mary—and names not heard much outside Appalachia, like Hiram, Sadie, and Vescar. I remember as a child liking the musicality of a lot of family names, such as Chloe, Erastus, and Rosina.

My grandparents were religious in the same way that everyone in that remote region of West Virginia was religious then—they were god-fearing Baptists who were too busy surviving to go to church much. But they did read the Bible, and a lot of the more obscure of our family names came from there, including Vashti, Enoch, and Dorcas. (Jesus raised Dorcas from the dead, as described in the book of Acts, and Vashti was the wife of a Persian king, per the book of Esther. Enoch was Noah's great-grandfather.) I have no idea why any of these names appealed to my forebears, but they did.

Spelling was at a premium back then. One of my father's sisters also had a biblical name, spelled Orpah in the Bible but misspelled on her birth certificate as Orpha. (I suspect Oprah Winfrey's parents made a similar mistake.)

My mother came from a large family as well, and no one ever thought to ask her mother (her father wasn't in the picture) why she was given the name Recie (pronounced ree-see). I've never met or even heard of anyone else with that name. Maybe her mother meant something else but I can't figure out what it could have been.

My paternal grandfather was Eli Center Miller but everyone called him "Center." As with my mother, I've never heard of anyone else called Center. I was very close with him and when my son was born his mother and I, perhaps unadvisedly, gave him Center as a middle name. It wasn't until my own father died and I was going through old papers that I found out that my grandfather's middle name on his birth certificate was actually spelled "Sentre." Again, either his parents couldn't spell Center, or they gave him the name Sentre for reasons now lost to time. I haven't found anyone else with that name.

My father was named "Thurmond" on his birth certificate but from as young as he could remember he spelled it Thurman. He knew from his parents that he was named Thurmond after a notorious small town not far from where they lived, where the Dun Glen Hotel hosted a fourteen-year-long poker party with free-flowing liquor all through Prohibition. Why my father's parents would choose such a name for him is also lost to history; I suspect that, after all those children, they didn't give it that much thought.

I was born years after my two older siblings and an unknown number of my mother's miscarriages. My parents wanted more children, but I was the third and final. They gave me a biblical first name (David is "beloved" in Hebrew) and the middle name Thurman, after my father.

Unlike my parents' and grandparents' unusual names, "David Miller" is one of the most common—there are tens of thousands of us out there. As a kid I was teased about my odd middle name, but as I've gotten older I've been glad to have it in my bundle of signifiers.