Re #1, the naming of males after female ancestors and vice versa: has anyone researched the frequency of this over time? My intuition is that it's probably much more of a 20th-century thing, but I have nothing more than anecdata to support this guess.

My grandmother, born in New York in 1922, was named for her uncle who had died young in 1920. Her uncle was named Herman Jacob in English and Chaim Yaakov in Hebrew, after his own grandfather; my grandmother was given the names Janet Hermine in English and Chaya in Hebrew. But by then, of course, our family was almost fully Americanized, and my grandmother's parents had likely become a lot less traditional than they had been when they came to the US as children around 1900 - both of them worked, they were not very religiously observant, etc. I am pretty skeptical that my grandmother would have been named in this way if she had been born in Podolia gubernia in 1852 rather than in New York in 1922.

Adam Turner