My parents named me Andrea Gabriela. My father’s name was Andreas, so my first name is after him. My middle name is for his aunt, who was a Benedictine nun, Sister Gabriela. Those names were significant for my parents. My brother got his name, William Francis, from his grandfathers. Mom’s father’s name was Wilhelm, and Dad’s father was Xaver Franz.

People usually name their children with names that they like very much, or that have a particular meaning for them. My husband Greg and his brother Peter both have middle names from their father, Wilfred Ernest. (Peter is Peter Wilfred, Greg is Gregory Ernest.)

We continued the tradition with naming our children. Our oldest daughter is Carly Anne, partly because we liked the music of Carly Simon, but we also liked the name. Anne just seemed to go well with it.

I wanted to name our son Matthew after a song by John Denver which I particularly loved. We gave him the middle name Gregory after his father.

We named our middle daughter Erin because the name caught our fancy. There were three Erins on television at the time: in the series MASH, Erin was the baby daughter back home of the Army field surgeon character B.J. Honeycutt, and he talked so longingly about wanting to go home to meet her; in The Waltons, one of the girls in the Walton family was named Erin; and the actress Erin Moran played Joanie Cunningham in Happy Days. We gave our Erin the middle name Gabriela after Sister Gabriela and me.

Our son Andrew Wilfred was named after both his grandfathers.

And our youngest daughter was named Katherine because we love the name Katie. We also gave her Greg’s mom’s middle name, Cecelia, which has special meaning for me, because Saint Cecilia is the patron saint of musicians.

Our daughters have continued the tradition with their own children. Erin and her husband, Dave, named the first of their twin daughters Robin Magdalena, after Dave’s mother and my mother. The second girl is named Henrietta Lyn, after Dave’s beloved “uncle” and grandmother.

Katie’s daughter is named Lily Gabriela, because she and her husband, Michael, really liked the name Lily, and Gabriela after me and Erin.