After reading about the slaves/children Thomas Jefferson had, I noticed that not only did his slave-mistress do this but his daughter did also.
i.e. Ellen Wayles Randolph (1794–1795).
Ellen Wayles Randolph (1796–1876).
Seems, I don't know, a bit morbid. I started to remember that I think Vincent Van Gogh was also given the name of a deceased sibling also. Was this common, was there a lack of names, or were they dead set on a name!?
In many cultures names were recycled from ancestors (parents, grand parents). The names carried some degree of honor and sentimentality, as one could track the name back through several generations. A name with a legacy considered significant enough to use once, would be worth using a second time in order to continue the legacy. Each time a name was reused, the significance and legacy would grow - reinforcing the tradition.
I think it is also worth pointing out, that the names of popes and English kings show a near continuous reuse of names considered significant in their history.
I'm admittedly leaning heavily on the sources below and someone else may be able to provide a more suitable answer.
If I was to add a bit of speculation, I would suggest that standard naming conventions (grandfathers name -> first son) may be related to standard inheritance conventions (fathers estate -> first son). The concept of "each child has an expected role to play in the family based upon their birth order" and "each child has an expected name in the family based upon their birth order" are equally foreign concepts to a modern western society but they do seem to compliment each other in the given context.
For example, it was common in Victorian England that the first name of the first male child was named after the father’s father. The second male child was named after the mother’s father. The third male child was named after the father. The first female child was named after the mother’s mother and the second female child is named after the father’s mother and the third female was named after the mother.
Of course, this naming convention had a downside. Children of the period often died at childbirth or at a very young age. It was not uncommon for the name of a parent or grandparent to be recycled or reused and given to the next child that was born. To put this another way, if you have an ancestor with a large family and two of the children have the same name, this tells you two things: the first child likely died before the second child was born and the name has great significance to the family.
Whenever a duplicate name occurred in these patterns, the next name in the series was used. If a child died in infancy the name was often reused for the next child of the same gender. A rare twist occurred sometimes. A child's name would be reused when a spouse died and the surviving spouse remarried and had more children with the next spouse. I found this happened when a spouse had children in Germany and then his spouse died. He left his children behind in Germany, possibly with the grandparents, and then emigrated to Pennsylvania. Sometime after arrival he remarried and named his eldest son born in Pennsylvania by his new spouse with the same name as the son still living in Germany. This results in two adult children with the same name.
http://www.kerchner.com/germname.htm
It is extremely common to find, in the French-Canadian family, all boys and all girls being given the same sex appropriate first name such as Jean for the boys or Marie for the girls. A family’s naming profile might look like this: Marie-Louise, Marie-Angélique, Marie, Marie-Josephe, Jean-Louis, Jean-Baptiste and Jean-Paul. The child in question would be called by the second name most often but it is also common to see for instance Marie-Louise documented on her marriage certificate simply as Marie making it impossible without other documentation to tell the difference between her and her sister who only carries the name Marie.
Another practice, which was very common amongst our French ancestors, was to re-use the name of a child who had died. This practice was used up until around the early 1930s after which it seems to have gone out of favour.
http://www.catudals.com/2012/10/french-naming-conventions.html
Difficulties are compounded when parents reuse a given name for a newborn child after an older sibling with the same name dies. Moreover, families in Quebec and Lower Canada were partial to using the same given names over and over, christening children after their grandparents or godparents (who were often aunts or uncles). As a result it is not uncommon to find several individuals of similar age, living in the same community or parish, bearing identical given names and surnames.