Help me with my homework

[liv]

Here's a challenge for you: can you suggest me some names, which meet the following criteria:

• Plausible for actual people (ie not sounding like a spammer)
• Not really obvious defaults or clichés like "John Smith"
• Not similar to any famous person or fictional character
• Reasonably easy to spell and make a guess at the pronunciation
• Not rude or comical
• Plausible for someone from a different ethnic background from your own
• If you're feeling really ambitious, I could do with names that sound plausible for children, middle-aged people, and elderly people.

The reason I'm asking is that one of my jobs for the summer is to help write a bunch of case studies and exam questions, and we always, always struggle with the names. We try to get a balance of implied ethnic backgrounds, (and a range of ages and genders is necessary because it's often medically relevant) but we usually end up with way too many variants on things like "Robert Johnson" and "Mary Barker". It's actually surprisingly difficult to come up with names, so what I'm aiming to do is make a list that we can select from, so that we don't keep getting bogged down in inventing names for our imaginary doctors and patients.

Comments

[vatine]

English given names (male):
John
Patric
Robert
Matthew
Leslie

English given names (female):
Mary
Jennifer
Olivia
Meredith
Leigh (could be gender-ambigous as "Lee")
Lesley

English surnames:
Cox
Smith
Johnston
O'Keefe
Sullivan
Gilbert

Finnish given names (male):
Juha
Mika
Juhani
Joonas
Linus

Finnish given names (female):
Satu
Kati
Anna
Sorry, I should know more, but none come to mind

Finnish surnames:
Takkinen
Aalto
Perälä
Rintamaa
Sadinmaa