Name research ideas

Hey all,

I’m looking for advice on how to help a child research the origins of their name and look for other famous people with the same name. I want to make it more of a fun project that just typing it into Google.

The backstory: my sister is a foster carer and has been caring for a little girl for around 4 years. She has never had contact with her birth parents and is on track to be adopted by my sister in the next few years. We’ve always been very close and she often has questions for me about her origins. She asked me recently how she got her name because the other kids in school were talking about the other names their parents were thinking of calling them before they settled on the actual name. She asked me how she got her name and I said that we don’t know but I would help her research this.

I’d love to make it a fun project for her as she doesn’t know her birth family, but I think her name is something that connects her with her past. I thought about Ancestry, but that raises all sorts of questions about her birth family that we simply cannot answer. Has anyone ever done offline research into names that can point me in the right direction? I work as a volunteer for the same fostering agency so I’d love to be able to report back on ways to help kids research their past without delving into the family tree.