William because I noticed awhile back that on my father’s side of the family going back through his father, and his father, and his father, etc… every other generation since 1736… 273 years… has been a William Minter. (Details below.) When I showed this to Brandy, her immediate and unhesitating reaction was “Well, we know what we have to name it if it is a boy.” And that was that for the first name.
We did also decide though that we would not actually call him that on a regular basis. There is already someone in the immediate family, my father, very much still using that name. So we’ll let him continue to be the William/Bill in the family. So we’ll call him by his middle name.
We tried a bunch of names as we were testing out calling him various things after we found out the gender. “Alex” just sort of stuck. There was no single moment where we decided that would be it, it just sort of happened and then we all realized that was what we were calling him. It is also the name of my sister Cynthia’s pet snake, but we decided we wouldn’t let that stop us. :-)
Anyway, it will be “William Alexander Minter”. We will generally call him Alex. Except Amy, who has decided to call him “WAM”.
Official due date is still September 21st, although the latest ultrasounds showed him a bit ahead of schedule, with an estimated date of September 5th. (Closer to what Brandy has thought all along.) So possibly not very long now at all.
Oh, and for those who are interested, the line of William Minters…
1619-1655: John Minter
1650-????: John Minter Jr
1690-1743: John Minter III
1736-1809: William Minter
1769-1846: John Minter
1797-1871: William Minter
1833-1913: John Russell Minter
1873-1943: William Ramseur Minter
1912-1991: David Ramseur Minter
1942- : William Maynard Minter
1971- : Samuel Antonio Minter
2009- : William Alexander Minter
And yes, for awhile there was something going on with the name “John” as well, but it seemed to have petered out almost 100 years ago. :-)
Edit a few minutes later: Look at my next post for baby registry information if you are interested.