"Bad Baby Names" Book is great

I ordered the "Bad Baby Names" book by Michael Sherrod and Matthew Rayback the other day - it is published by (surprise!) Ancestry Publishing, where Sherrod is a VP of Ancestry Publishing at TGN. The subtitle is "The worst true names parents saddled their kids with - and you can too!"

I must admit that while I've spent hours trying to find strange, funny, weird or obscene names in the census records (see this post for my contributions to the genre), that I have rarely considered using any of the given names, surnames or combinations that are in this book. Therefore, it has broadened my, ahem, "education." It's a wonderful read.

As I have said too many times to count - "what were their parents thinking?" The authors say this in their book too - on page 13.

The "best of the bunch" so far in my limited reading include (and considering "fair use"):

Toilet Queen (page 6)
Emma Royd (page 7)
Tackle Feigenbutz (page 16) (this is a girl!)
Wanna French (page 31) - there's a whole page of "Wanna"s, and Ima's and Lotta's too!
Uranus Stukey (page 44)
Hell Hess, whose husband is Christian Hess (page 53)
Lust Garten (page 87)
Acne Fountain (page 120)

And they didn't even use any of the obscene or risque names... my favorite is Hyman Spanker.

They have a blog, of course, called Sticks and Stones at http://www.badbabynames.net/.

This would be a great stocking stuffer for a genealogist or an excellent raffle drawing prize for a genealogy society (no, you can't have mine!). It's only $9.95 retail, and you can get it for $6.97 at www.RootsBooks.com (I did!).

Here's a theme for my attentive readers and fellow genea-bloggers - "if you had a chance to name your children again, what names would you choose to honor your ancestors?"