How did you choose your kids' names?

D's middle name is that of H's sister who died at a few weeks old her first name was simply one we liked. I didn't think it common at the time but there were 2 others in her class in senior school.
S's middle name is a family name. His first name too was just one we liked. I remember one of his preschool helpers saying it was a name she hadn't heard for years. It's not old fashioned or unusual though.

My first daughter was named after a character in a 1970's, American, comedy series. Then the name was unusual but quite a few people had the same idea......but I still love the name.
My second daughter was going to be called Emma for almost the whole of my pregnancy but we (I) had a change of heart and she was given an old fashioned, classic name.
When I had our son my husband wanted to call him Steven, I wanted David (both our brother's name) but eventually he was called after my favourite cousin who I had had a crush on when I was younger. BYW we called our black labrador Emma!!

I knew what I'd call a daughter in my teens too, baubles. When she was born it was an unusual name, but within a couple of years had become quite popular...(nothing to do with me, honest!)

Both our daughters have family names which have been in every generation of my family for hundreds of years

I chose DD's name before I met her father . Well, I'd always said if I ever had a daughter I'd give her the name of a character in a book I'd loved as a young teen. DH liked the name fortunately.

We both liked short, strong names and chose DS's name with that in mind. I also liked the look of it written down.

We just chose what we liked for all 3 of them, they were quite classic but I always remember taking my son to register at our doctors which was a large practice, and the receptionist saying well he's the only Samuel we have on our books.. I don't remember there being another one through all his school years either.

We chose our DC names because we liked them.
However my family tradition (Scots) was to use previous family surnames as middle names
My mother had 2 middle surnames one from each side of the family .
My father also had his mother's family surname for his middle name.
A tradition that my male cousin''s have carried on.
All my parents siblings had previous generation's surnames as their middle names

In hindsight I can see the advantage of using family surnames as middle names, it certainly makes looking back on the family tree much easier.

We named DD after DH's aunt who was the only rich member of the family (No ulterior motif honestly) Unfortunately the aunt was later swindled out of all her money by her grandson

When it came to DS we just called him after his grandad.

After teaching hundreds of students it was quite a challenge finding names for our DSs that did not have another boy's face attached!

We eventually chose names that reflected our Scottish heritage, but did not already occur within the immediate family.

I named my first DS because it's a Scottish name I liked. When it came to the second, I had been reading about Arthurian Legends and was thinking of a Round Table Knight's name. Fortunately the then OH came to the rescue and gave him a normal name which we both liked otherwise he might have been Lancelot or Galahad. In my case, my first name was the second name of two of my great-grandmothers.