Dad, Tell Me About the Time (49)

Thursday, March 27, 2025

Who decided on the name of each child?

Not long after we started dating, mom and I went to a movie called Xanadu. It starred Olivia Newton John as a muse named Kira. 

Kira’s second name, Anne, is from Lisa’s great grandma Shaw, Annie (Robertson) Shaw.

Brandons second name, James, is from Lisa’s great grandpa, James Shaw, Annies’s husband. Lisa knew and loved her great grandparents well.

Brandon is just a name that Lisa and I both loved. We would choose names by both suggesting a name and if one of us didn’t like the name then we moved on to a different name.

Lisa has always loved the name Benjamin and always wanted to name a son Benjamin. When she suggested his name, I loved it as well, so our second son was Benjamin. We thought about making his second name Shaw, but Lisa didn’t like the sound of Benjamin Shaw Leavitt so we went for “Scott” to honor her Scottish heritage.

As we have gotten older and our ancestors have become more important to us, we sometimes regret that we didn’t just use “Shaw” as his middle name.

Alycia is named after three different people. Alycia’s middle name is Grayce which was her Grandma Shaw’s middle name. Donna Grayce Kesler. We liked the spelling with the “y”, so we kept it.

Her first name, Alycia, is after her great grandma, Alice (Logan) Ashmead. Alycia is a variant of the name Alice. We added the “y” so it would match the “y’ in Grayce and we thought it was pretty.

Oddly, hundreds of years ago, Alice was actually spelled Alys. I think it has German roots.

Finally, my grandma Leavitt’s middle name was also Grace. Nellie Grace Quinton.

Alex is an odd one. Neither one of us had ever considered Alex as a name, but once Lisa started making progress with her genealogy, she started finding a lot of Alexanders in her ancestry. She suggested it to me, and I loved it. Somehow we both knew our third son had to be named Alex.

His middle name, Thomas, also comes from several ancestors.

Even though he goes by Boyd, Lisa’s dad’s full name is Thomas Boyd Shaw. 

Lisa’s grandpa Shaw’s name is also Thomas Boyd Shaw.

My second great grandfather was Thomas Rowell Leavitt.

Sarah is a huge name on the Leavitt side. My fourth great grandmother was Sarah Shannon Leavitt. Her daughter, my third great grandmother, was Sarah Sturdevant Leavitt and is the woman who first joined the church and along with her large family, migrated west with the saints. The hardest part of this trek she had to do as a single mother since her husband died near Winters Quarters. Sarah’s middle name, Christine is a name that mom and I both loved.