The first time I was invited to a discussion about names and heritage, I thought I had nothing to share. Little did I know that every name has a story, equally universal and deeply unique.

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In the past when I'd asked my parents about my name, they just said they both thought it was nice. That was boring, but sufficient. It was many years later that I realized my name and my heritage connected in a way that was very personal and yet universal. I became fascinated with names and have spent the years since then studying them.

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My birth name was Karen. It has strong linguistic origins in Denmark, where it comes from the Greek word for Aikaterine, meaning "pure." But like most people in the world named Karen, I have no Scandinavian roots. A name that was easy to spell and pronounce, with homonyms in many cultures, Karen became popular worldwide and especially in a country of immigrants, where families desperate for fresh starts and freedom from persecution chose it as a symbol of hope and a promise of a blank slate. 

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This fits my family's story. My ancestors on one side fled pogrom brutality and the other side fled genocidal starvation to come to the United States. My parents met when mixed-religion marriages were uncommon and both families strongly disapproved. Their hope lay in their determination to create something new, and so they chose a name for their firstborn that seemed unbound to any one cultural or familial origin, one that, as it happens, neatly knit Anglo tradition with the Hebrew "Keren" to meet both sides of the family tree. 

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Then weren't alone. Karen reached its peak in the US in 1965 as the third most popular name for girls that year. Today, it's the 13th most common US woman's name overall since the recording of name trends began. (#1 is Mary.)

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When I was born, America knew Karen as the sincere, blond-ringleted 9- year-old star who shyly grew up in front of America's eyes as a Mouseketeer, and the perky all-American teenager from the eponymous NBC sitcom that featured the Beach Boys singing her praises every week on America's TVs. These characters portrayed Karen to a generation of young parents as universally loved, happy young women with easy lives in which all problems were minor and resolved by the end of the show. Who wouldn't want such a halcyon pathway for their child? 

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So maybe it’s ironic that decades later, the name has been superimposed upon an all-encompassing and negative stereotype, but at a time when many people are justifiably questioning the success and equity of America’s promise, I don’t think that’s at all coincidental. I can understand, and yet for me it felt deeply hurtful, which started me on a learning journey to find out why names mean so much to us humans. 

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Years ago I had run across the Gaelic name Caoimhe in a novel, and since I didn't speak Gaelic, in my head I read it phonetically as "Kaomi." (Years later I would learn that the actual pronunciation is far from English phonetic.) For reasons I can't explain, I developed a unique fondness for the made-up name Kaomi, which couldn't even be found on the internet in those days. (There are quite a few of us now.) More than a decade later, making the decision to change my name was very hard, but deciding what to change it to was easy.

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The beautiful middle name given me at birth was French: Suzanne, meaning rose or lily, again chosen just because it sounded nice (no French ancestry either!) I liked it, but didn't like the way it sounded alongside Kaomi.  One evening I went with some friends to watch the luminous Samara Joy in concert and found myself thinking what an lovely thing it could be to be named Joy. A few days later I was contemplating a middle name and remembered that. "Hey," I thought to myself, "I can claim Joy for myself!"

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So that is the story of my name - and of the origin of this Museum. The more I dug into the history, psychology, sociology, linguistics, geography, social justice, neuroscience, and yes, even mathematics of names, the more I wanted to curate all this knowledge in a place that people can wander through at leisure to learn more about themselves and others. The Museum is born to help laypeople and scholars alike learn about, discuss, and enjoy names and the naming process. 

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So, enough about me. Everybody has a name story. What's yours?