Naming a Baby After a Relative: The Customs — and the Taboos

"Should we name her after Grandma?" has a completely different answer depending on which naming tradition is asking — some actively require it, and some treat it as something close to bad luck.

Reusing a relative's name is one of the oldest naming instincts there is, but it splits almost perfectly into two opposite customs depending on where it comes from. In some traditions, naming a child after a specific living relative is the whole point — it's an honour, an obligation, or both. In others, it's something you deliberately avoid, for reasons that have nothing to do with running out of good names. Here's how four real, still-practised systems handle it.

Western "Juniors": reuse the exact name, add a number

The Western "Junior," "II," "III" convention names a child after a living parent or grandparent using the identical full name, distinguished only by a suffix. It's most strongly associated with eldest-son-after-father naming in American and British families, and it's a straightforward continuity statement — the ordinal suffix exists specifically so the two people can still be told apart on the same mail, the same family tree and, eventually, the same gravestone. Unlike the systems below, there's no religious or superstitious rule attached; it's purely a social custom, which is also why it's the easiest of the four to opt out of without controversy.

Ashkenazi Jewish custom: never name after someone still alive

Ashkenazi Jewish tradition holds the opposite rule from the Western Junior: a child is named to honour and keep alive the memory of a relative who has died, and naming a baby after a living relative is traditionally avoided. The reasoning passed down isn't really about etiquette — one common folk explanation is that it risked confusing the Angel of Death between the two namesakes, which is exactly the kind of reason a custom keeps even after people stop believing the literal version. In practice this means a new baby is often named, at least in part, for a recently deceased grandparent or great-grandparent, which is also why the same handful of names tend to resurface in a family roughly one generation after a death rather than right away.

Sephardic Jewish custom: the opposite, on purpose

Sephardic Jewish tradition — among Jewish communities with roots in Spain, Portugal and the wider Mediterranean and Middle East — commonly does the reverse: naming a child after a living grandparent is the norm and a mark of honour, often following a set order (a first son for the paternal grandfather, a first daughter for the maternal grandmother, and so on through the grandparents). Two branches of the same religion, with the same underlying instinct to honour a specific relative by name, ended up with rules that are near-exact mirror images of each other on the one point that matters most: whether that relative has to be gone first.

The traditional Irish naming pattern: a fixed ancestor grid

Pre-20th-century Irish (and wider Gaelic Scottish) families often followed an explicit naming order rather than picking relatives case by case: the first son named for the father's father, the second son for the mother's father, the first daughter for the mother's mother, the second daughter for the father's mother, and further children working down through aunts, uncles and the parents themselves. Genealogists researching Irish family trees still use this pattern as a working rule of thumb — if a run of baptismal records seems to repeat the same small set of names in the same birth order across generations, it's very often this grid at work rather than coincidence or a shortage of imagination.

Chinese naming taboo: the opposite of reuse

Traditional Chinese naming custom — distinct from the generation-poem system covered in our piece on Chinese generational names — includes bihui (避讳), a longstanding taboo against using a character from an ancestor's or a reigning emperor's personal name in anyone else's name or even in ordinary writing. Where the Irish grid and the Sephardic custom treat reusing a name as the respectful choice, bihui treats reusing a specific character as disrespectful, sometimes requiring substitute characters or vocabulary to be used even in official documents and literature for generations after. It's the clearest example among these four systems of a culture arriving at "names carry weight across generations" and then taking the opposite practical rule from it.

Why the contradiction isn't really a contradiction

All four systems agree on the premise that a relative's name is too significant to hand out casually — they just disagree on what "respecting that" requires. Reuse-while-living (Sephardic, Western), reuse-after-death (Ashkenazi), reuse-in-fixed-order (Irish) and never-reuse (Chinese bihui) are four different answers to the same underlying question, not four unrelated customs. If you're choosing a name with a family history question attached — can we use Grandpa's name, should we wait — the honest answer is usually "it depends which of your family's traditions you're actually following," because more than one defensible answer exists.

This page describes general naming customs that vary by individual family, branch and era, and have many local exceptions; it is not a religious or genealogical ruling for any specific family. Published 2026-10-19.