Appalachian Name Generator

Appalachian names sound the way they do because the mountains held onto things the rest of the country let go. The families who settled the hollows of eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, southwest Virginia, east Tennessee and western North Carolina were mostly Scots-Irish, English, Welsh and German, and their surnames still dominate the region: Caudill, Combs, Sizemore, Hensley, Mullins, Adkins, Blevins, Tackett, Sexton, Slone, Stamper, Fugate, Ratliff, Begley, Whitaker and Hatfield and McCoy. Many are clustered by county, so two people with the same last name in Letcher or Mingo County are often kin.

First names are where the region's character really shows. Old Testament names stayed in use long after they faded elsewhere (Jubal, Enoch, Hezekiah, Mahala, Obadiah), alongside nineteenth-century favorites like Delphia, Dovie, Idella, Hobart, Verlin and Elzie, and a fondness for unusual names that sound like places or virtues: Arizona, America, Pleasant, Easter, Commodore, Columbus. Double names are everywhere (Billy Ray, Ruby Nell, Ora Lee, Jimmy Dale), and grown men go by Bud, Junior, Sonny or Hob their whole lives.

The names here are built from those real patterns, for novels, screenplays, bluegrass and old-time personas, family history writing, or any character who needs to sound like they came from up the holler rather than from a Hollywood idea of it.