>>>>>>>FWIW, my partners name is Tamar. Maybe because her father was half Georgian (where I believe it is common) or maybe because her mother lived near the Tamar (a river on the Devon/Cornwall border)
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Probably pronounced differently than I do, though. I'll bet she's "TAY-mahr," since that's how I'm told the river is pronounced. I pronounce it "tuh-MAHR," which is close to, but not quite, the Hebrew pronunciation.
>>>>>
>>>>>Your right - usually TaYmar but also TaMmar (as Mike thought). She answers to both (when she's listening :-} )
>>>>>Actually, most often it's just 'Tam'
>>>>
>>>>Which would never work for me, because for me the "m" is definitely part of the second syllable. I've never actually had a shortened version of my name. My parents were very anti-nickname, so none of us were called by them.
>>>>
>>>
>>>Supposedly Dwight Eisenhower's parents named him Dwight David instead of David Dwight because they didn't want anyone calling him Dave.
>>
>>And, in fact, my father was David, rarely called Dave as an adult. But as a child, often called Davey, which I suspect is part of what formed his views on the subject. He was one of five children, four of them boys, and says that in their small Texas town, where they were one of only two Jewish families, all four boys were often referred to as "Zeke," short for their surname of Ezekiel.
>>
>>Tamar
>
>A very close friend in Brooklyn comes from a Jewish secular tradition which I think is similar to your own (though if I remember your family also represents very long established Jewish families in America where his is of more recent Russian lineage.) The biggest similarity I see is that "finishing school" in his family means when you get your (first) PhD ;-)
>
>But there also seems some families deliberately choose names that reinforce the secular or perhaps cross cultural intentions of the familiy. While his mother's name was Sarah, he is Paul (Steinfeld) and his children are Matthew and Anne.
>
>My friend Steve Silverman's family (Long Island) is similar, and at his wedding to a woman from an old Rhode Island family it was very apparent as she is Miriam, her father Abraham and all members of her family seemed to have names from the Old Testament while all his family echoed names from a Catholic Hagiography.

FWIW, in my father's family (a mix of immigrants with many generations here), everyone in my generation (15 of us) has a Hebrew or Biblical name. On my mother's side (where my mother's generation are the immigrants), it's more of a mix--some traditional Jewish names, some more trendy-at-the-time names.

My kids' generation is more of a mix (and actually, more than a generation, ranging from 33 down to 2) and some of the ones with the trendy-then names have kids with traditional Jewish names.

Tamar

P.S. I was scanning family photos yesterday and they included a shot of my grandfather's great-grandfather. It just blows me away to have that.