With the arrival of ankle-biter #2 only two short months away, Ari and I are looking high and low for baby names. A few that have made it into the “I love this name but do I really want to curse a kid with it?” category are Ezra, Theodore and Eliot (may favorite is Eliot). We have many great resources at home and online that we consult for naming purposes (the best has got to be The Name Book by Pierre Le Rouzic), but there is another, more non-traditional collection of resources that I’ve been using to gather names at work: genealogical aids, such as obituary, birth and marriage registers. Texas State Library gets many of these kinds of materials, a lot of which contain names of people who lived hundreds of years ago. There are your standard names like John and George that pop up no matter which generation you look at; there are names which were popular long ago but are not popular now (Enoch?); and there are names that were popular then, fell out of favor for a spell, and are becoming popular again. But there is one name I found today that is hands-down my favorite name of all. I found it in a book called The Arkansas Gazette Obituaries Index, 1819-1879: Monkey Brown. Died in 1826. Good ol’ Monkey Brown. I’ve made my decision. What about you? What would you name a kid?