My SIL felt strongly her children’s names should “match” their surname. Her husband’s last name was Italian, so she gave both children Italian names even though one was born in America and one born in the Domincan Republic, and my SIL is Mexican.
I like the idea of the names sort of matching, but would not be quite as strict as her. I would care that their names can be pronounced fairly easily by the people in the country they grow up in and by our own family. I also would want to make sure their name doesn’t mean or sound like anything negative or to laugh at in the country’s language. It also would matter if I was in the other country for just a few years, or planned to stay permanently. If the name can easily be shortened or nicknamed that might solve any problems when the children are young. Maybe the short is easy for the country we live in.
My mom wanted to name my sister Shannon Elizabeth, she loves Irish names, and the family was very negative about it. It was so not Jewish. She wound up giving up the idea. This is all in America, we have been here for 2 or 3 generations, and my real name is a very popular American name, my sister’s name is more popular now then when she was little, but still very American and both my parents have very commonly used names in American. But, they are also names Jewish people use quite often, even though non Jews use them often also. So, I guess that is the matching thing, similar to what my SIL wanted. I just remembered a coworker of mine was bothered when her son named their daughter Savannah, which I think is a beautiful name. She said to me, “it’s so unJewish.” Her DIL wasn’t Jewish. I think it sort of felt like a loss to her to go in such a different direction with the name. So, even living in our own country there were cultural norms and considerations going on. Think about it, in the US, does a northerner give a southern name to their child? What about a white person using a traditionally black name?