About Hannah
A Lifelong Namer
Me with my Cabbage Patch Doll, circa Christmas 1983. Each doll came with a birth certificate and (reportedly) a unique name. Maybe that's where my interest started.
I've loved names, words, and stories for as long as I can remember.
I got my first baby name book at about eight years old, and I was naming characters long before then. I remember agonizing over what to name my plastic horses when I was five or six, young enough that my mother had to write the names down for me. I drew up lists of my favorite names, and then named our goldfish, and later our puppy. By the time I was in high school I was writing my first (very-much-never-published) novel--a future dystopia where everyone had a word name and my protagonist's name was Rhythm.
As a sociologist, I immersed myself in the science of names and naming while getting my PhD at UC Berkeley. I spent years analyzing American parents’ naming practices, reviewing data from Social Security Administration records as well as millions of California birth certificates, and conducting in-depth interviews with local families about how they chose their children’s names.
Both before and after completing my PhD, I consulted many times with expectant friends and colleagues, answering their name questions. In 2017, I created a platform to make those services available to the public through Ipseity Baby Name Consulting: in a very short time, I'd realized that the search for the perfect name encompassed many people beyond expectant parents. In the years since, I've been honored to work with a few adult clients seeking to rename themselves, and I look forward to the opportunity to do more of this work.
Through the years, I've also continued to express my name nerdery in other ways. I'm still spinning my own story worlds, thinking at length about names for characters in the contemporary real world and in fantasy and science fiction. I've helped people name pets and cars. When my partner and I bought a house, it needed a name--and as we brought two children into it over the years, they did, too.
Naming has been a special interest of mine all my life. I'm excited to have the opportunity to work with clients on their own name journeys.
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Fun fact: neither of my kids' names appeared on any name list I ever wrote. My twelve-year-old self would've probably named them Stella and Isaac. But that wasn't the name journey we were on.