by Maggie Downs posted in Life

You never know when inspiration will strike.
I?m talking about baby names, of course.
When I was pregnant, my husband and I kept a running list of potential baby names. The problem was that between our jobs -- he's a teacher, I'm a journalist -- we had a lot of bad associations attached to perfectly good names. This meant we had to find a name that didn?t make us think of a kid in detention, a city councilperson, or a criminal.

First we looked to family names and ancestors for ideas, and that gave us only one (Alice).
Then my husband mined his favorite movies for potential baby names, and he came up with nothing but Private Ryan. Meanwhile, I?m a book nerd, so I thought about all the authors and characters who have touched me. That was fruitful: Maya, Charlotte, Harper, Esme, Matilda, Ramona, Eloise, Zadie, and Sylvia. We moved on to historical figures, then teachers, activists, and role models. My husband checked out a series of baby name lists, all themed something like "baby names taken from nature" while I scoured "hipster baby names" and lists of the most popular baby names in other countries. That landed us Lola, Cleo, Hazel, Iris, Ivy, Sadie, Saffron, and Wren.
Then we found out we were having a boy. 
Back to square one! (We?d gathered a few boy names here and there, but we were just meh about all of them.)
As a last resort, I turned to maps. I pored over an atlas in search of place names of some significance ...