Combination of Willa (resolute protector) and Mae (month of May).
Willamae is an American compound given name, blending Wilhelm — the Germanic name meaning 'will' or 'desire' plus 'helm' or 'protection,' Anglicized as William — with Mae, the warm and lilting diminutive of Mary or Margaret that became independently fashionable in the late nineteenth century. The practice of creating such double-barreled given names was widespread in the American South and rural Midwest from roughly the 1880s through the 1940s, producing names like Lillamae, Berthamae, Rosalee, and countless others that combined a traditional given name with a popular suffix or second element. These names reflect a distinctly American vernacular naming creativity, operating outside formal etymological tradition.
The element Mae carried considerable cultural cachet in the early twentieth century, largely through the towering presence of Mae West, the actress and comedian whose wit, self-possession, and refusal to be diminished made her name synonymous with a certain bold femininity. But Mae was beloved well before West gave it celebrity luster — it appears in poetry, popular song, and American literature as a shorthand for a sunny, rural, all-American girlhood. The pairing with Willia- (itself a feminization of William, extremely common in the South as Willa or Willia) created a name that felt simultaneously sturdy and sweet.
Willamae belongs to the rich archive of American folk names that flourished before standardized naming fashions homogenized birth registers. It appears most commonly in records from Appalachia, the Deep South, and the border states, often in families where naming honored multiple relatives at once by conflating their names. Today Willamae has a distinctly heirloom quality — it carries the warmth of great-grandmothers' quilts and hand-lettered recipe cards, and for families interested in recovering this strand of American naming heritage, it offers a genuinely original choice with deep regional roots.