Jessica Alba gave birth to baby number two last weekend. If you haven’t already heard, she named her second daughter Haven Garner. What’s the story behind her baby name choice? Linda Rosenkrantz and Pamela Redmond of Nameberry offer their insight on the celebrity baby name.
Haven Garner is the unusual and surprising choice of Jessica Alba and Cash Warren for their newborn second daughter.
Haven is a heaven-related word name that first hit the U.S. Top 1000 for girls in the late 90s and has been edging upward ever since, now standing at Number 651, with 446 girls receiving the name in the last year counted. While not as religious or as popular as Heaven or even its trendy flip side Nevaeh, Haven feels both spiritual and trendy, suggesting a safe harbor.
Haven relates to the spiritual side of her big sister Honor’s name, more in the vein of word names like Destiny and Trinity than virtue names such as Faith and Hope. Both names also obviously start with H and contain five letters in two syllables. Their biggest difference: Vintage. While Honor has been used for hundreds of years, as far back as the Puritans, Haven is newly-minted.
The best-known bearer of the name is writer Haven Kimmel, author of the memoir A Girl Named Zippy.
The baby’s middle name, Garner, is a surname meaning “granary” that she shares with her father, whose full name is Cash Garner Warren.
Linda Rosenkrantz and Pamela Redmond Satran are the creators of the baby name site Nameberry and the authors of ten bestselling books about names, including Cool Names for Babies and The Baby Name Bible.