Post 2.0.1.0 Choosing a Medieval Name

Stylized greetings and perfunctory generalized wishes of well-being to you.

In Post 2.0.0.0, I mentioned that I use the tag Yllaria, a variation of the name Hillary, that it's relation to the name Hillary is not the reason I started using it, and that it has a slight relationship to my name.

You see, once upon a time, I played with the Society for Creative Anachronism.  It is customary, when doing so, to develop a medieval persona, and I named mine Yllaria.  When one develops a medieval persona, one reads through lists and lists of medieval names to find a name that was used "in period". 

While I was looking through lists and lists and thinking about how I might go about choosing a name, I heard a comment.  The comment was that there were too many people in the SCA with first names starting with A.  The proposed reason for that was that people start reading the lists of names and stop at the first one that sounds good to them.

I have absolutely no idea if the person opining the above had an accurate take on names in the SCA, but from then on I started at the other end of the lists I was perusing.  Also, I thought that it would probably be hard to learn to answer to a different name and considered that it might be easier to do if the name sounded something like my actual name.  It wasn't, but I didn't know that at the time.

My actual name has an L in it (not at the beginning) and ends with an 'uh' sound.  Heck, let's not be coy.  The L is just before the 'uh'.  So Yllaria was a name from the end of the alphabet that sounded vaguely like my actual name.  The list said that it (and Hillary) were references to laughing. 

That clinched it.  I like laughing.  Yllaria it was.

Then I had to find a surname.  That took longer.