Every Neal Everywhere All At Once: A Tale Of Odd Irish Coincidences

WORCESTER, MA — Hey Neal, where's your hammer?

That's the best taunt my classmates at Oakdale Elementary School in Dedham could come up with in the early 1990s for my uncommon first name. It only makes sense if you pronounce it with a Boston accent as "Nail."

For decades, I lived a lonely existence with this 12-letter Irish name, dealing with countless misspellings and mispronunciations (any telemarketer will tell you my name is pronounced "Mick-nam-ra"), often wondering if anyone had suffered the same relatively slight inconveniences related to it.

Improbably, I recently discovered through the luck of the Irish (and Google) that there are two people living within a few miles of me with the same name.

So I, Neal James McNamara, of Worcester, decided to talk to Neal James McNamara, of East Greenwich, RI, and Neil Macnamara, of Worcester, about what it's like having our names — and the odd parallels between our lives.

None of us have ever spoken to another Neal or Neil McNamara. A quick internet search shows other Neal McNamaras living in Missouri, Australia and Canada. But to have three in the same general region seemed awful strange to me, especially since neither Neal nor Neil has ever been an extremely popular name.

Neal said his parents, who are actually from Ireland, just liked the name; no one else in his family has it. Neil said he was named after a relative on his mother's side, a prominent figure in the family because he sued New York City when they wouldn't let him become a firefighter due to how tall he was. My grandfather, Frank, was a firefighter in Somerville, and was pretty tall.

According to the Social Security Administration, the names Neal and Neil both reached peak popularity in 1952. Neal was the 198th most popular name that year, Neil the 146th most popular. Neil saw a brief resurgence in the late 1970s, which I think might be related to Neil Young's popularity.

My father named me after Neil Young. But he chose the N-e-a-l spelling because he considered it more Irish-correct and better looking on paper, he told me recently. I was born in 1983, Neal was born in 1955 and Neil was born in 1964.

Neal has sunk in popularity like a shot of Jameson in a glass of Guinness over time, according to the SSA: it hasn't been within the top 1,000 most popular names since 2002 when it was No. 951. Neil is still pretty unpopular: it was a lowly No. 719 in 2021, the most recent year data is available.

A short list of strange parallels between Neal, Neil and Neal:

• All three of us have ties to New York City: RI Neal was born in Queens and raised in the Bronx; Neil was born in Queens; I went to high school in Manhattan.
• Neal used to live two blocks from where I went to school in New York City.
• Neil and I both went to college at a State University of New York (SUNY) schools.
• Neal named his son James. My father's name is James.
• Neil's grandfather was a writer in Worcester in the early 20th Century.
• Neal and my father were both born in 1955
• Neal's wife, Elizabeth, used to be an editor at Patch, and opened her own news website after leaving the company years ago.
• Neal was sometimes called Cornelius in school, which is my wife's grandfather's name — but he went by Neil.
• Neil and I both worked at summer camps in New Jersey.

All three of us have suffered the indignity of mispronunciations and misspellings. Neil, who works as a real estate agent, probably has it worst since he's a "Mac" but with the twist of a lowercase "n." Most times people misspell his name "McNamara," he said.

"I've never understood why people have problems," he said. "I've seen a lot harder names to spell."

There's a folktale behind that uncommon spelling, Neil said. During the potato famine, a Macnamara clan refused to eat soup being doled out by a local church. The Macnamaras (or Mcnamaras) who accepted the soup got the capital N, he said.

The name itself apparently means "hound of the sea," although I think name meanings and coats of arms are mostly entertainment for Irish-Americans. I have an uncle from Killarney in Ireland, and I've never heard him voluntarily talk about that stuff.

In general, you'll commonly find people with the name McNamara (however you want to spell it) along Ireland's central western coast. Neal said his grandfather — who died while working inside the Hudson River tubes that connect PATH trains to New Jersey — was from the city of Limerick in County Limerick. That's less than 40 miles from Ennistymon, a town in County Clare where my McNamara relatives are apparently from, according to research conducted by my cousin, Shaun McNamara, who lives in Pepperell.

That's another strange connection: Neal works as an attorney in Providence, which is about 40 miles from my home here in Worcester. Neil lives along Burncoat Street in Worcester, a corridor that I often ride my bike along. We're as geographically close as we would've been in the old country, I suppose.

I'm not sure how mathematically common it is for people to end with the same exact names, but it happens.

My stepmother has a pretty unique name: Barbara Woike. About 25 years ago while working as an editor at the Associated Press in Midtown Manhattan, she got a call out of nowhere from a Barnard College student wanting to deliver some paperwork.

A second Barbara Woike, it turns out, was working as a professor at Barnard just a few subway stops away in Harlem. It was a coincidence so weird, they decided to meet up — and have been friends ever since.

"A couple of surprising similarities include discovering, years into our relationship, that we also had the same middle name: Ann," my stepmother told me recently. "And one day I noticed a scar on her right knee, exactly like one I have on my left knee. Turns out we'd both suffered dislocated kneecaps as adolescents and later had the same surgery to correct it."

I told Neal and Neil that I would be writing about our names as a kind of lighthearted St. Patrick's Day column. Although both are interested in their Irish heritage, they don't listen to the Dropkick Murphy's every day or partake in the whole paddy-power thing. Neil will maybe go to O'Connor's in Worcester once or twice a year. Neal doesn't particularly enjoy March 17.

"It thrives on the worst stereotypes of the Irish," he said of St. Patrick's Day.

Finally, I had to ask each of them: did the kids in school ever ask you where your hammer was?

Nope. Neil, who is 6'5", said he was always the biggest kid in the class and wasn't mocked much at all.

Neal did get some abuse over the name, but differently. At his Catholic elementary school, a nun told the class to kneel. When Neal instead replied "Yes?" she whacked him.

"I like it now, but growing up I wasn't that wild about it," Neal told me. "You can't do anything with it. There are no good nicknames."

Nailed it.