The Reason for the Duggar Family's Baby-Naming Tradition

We're often asked why all of our kids' names begin with the letter J. There's no quick answer, but it started with our first child. Emotionally, we loved the Bible name Joshua. So we named our first child Josh after him. At the time we thought if we ever had another boy somewhere down the road, it would be fun to name him Caleb because Joshua and Caleb hung out together in the Bible, and they were great guys.

Later, after Josh was born, I went back on the pill, and then I ended up getting pregnant while I was on it, and I ended up having a miscarriage. Not too long after that we became pregnant with twins (John-David and Jana) and we were so excited, and we loved the Bible name of John. My grandmother's name was Ana, and we put the J on the front, because we wanted to show honor, and we thought that Ana was a great person in the scriptures as well. She was a prophet that recognized Jesus when he was an infant brought into the synagogue.

When we had our fourth child, Jill, we thought, "Well, if this is the last baby that we have it would be terrible if we had Josh, Jana, John, and ... Marianne. Because they might say, "Why didn't you name me with a J?" It's not something we planned, thinking "Let's name all of our kids with J's." We just didn't want to leave anybody out after that, so the J names stuck.

This post was written by Michelle Duggar.

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