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Any name that starts with Mal, such as Malorie, is usually negative. This comes from latin, in which "mal" means "bad".

I know some other: Cormac (son of defilement), Ajax (mourner) and Melanie (black, dark). And while the name Candida doesn't have negative meaning (it means white), all I can think about it when I hear it is yeast infection.

Well, most of the names you have listed only technically have negative meanings - it is the religious connection which is important, and would be seen as positive by religious Spaniards, Italians et cetera. For example, Dolores meaning pains or suffering - Santa Maria de los Dolores is the Spanish way of saying Our Lady of Suffering, one of many such names for the Virgin Mary. So Dolores actually evokes thoughts of suffering relieved by the Virgin, suffering endured thanks to the Virgin's grace, and also the suffering which she endured, and a Christian's desire to remember the sacrifices made by both her and other early Christians.

A few from our family tree that surprised me as far as negative meanings:

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Calvin - Bald
Caleb - Dog
Mary - Bitter

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The meanings definitely deter me from being interested in the names.

Yeah for sure. In Indian villages if a couple's children fail to thrive, they name their child on something unpleasant out of sheer superstition so that death will spare him/her as if death is also fond of good names. Anyways, I had this teacher named Suglaram, sugla here means grubby, one who rarely bathes. Also, some men were named Saitan meaning devil, so that they frighten everybody, a "manly" feature. The name Durjan is also heard, it means bad man.

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I don't find the name meaning pity, solitude and martyrdom unpleasant.

Many Catholic "Marian" names have less than great meanings. The worse part is that women whose name is "Maria X" tend to go by "X" - so a Maria dos Prazeres is called Prazeres ("pleasures") in her daily life! ("Pleasures, eat your soup!" xD)

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Other than the examples you mentioned, I've heard:
Maria do Socorro ("socorro!" is the word you use when crying for help)
Maria da Pena (pena means "feather" or "quill" in Portuguese, but coincides with the word for "pity" or "sentence")
Maria dos Remédios (literally "remedies", but also means "medicine, drug")
Maria da Agonia ("agony")
Maria das Necessidades ("necessities"... also a euphemism for using the bathroom)
Maria do Desterro ("banishment")
Maria do Pranto ("tears, despair")

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In Spanish:
María de los Suspiros ("sighs")
María de la Regla ("menstruation").

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More ideas:
Calvin (bald), Cecily (blind), Portia (pig), Cassius (empty), Desdemona (ill-fated), Persephone (murder, destroy), Blaise (lisp), Balbina /-o (stammerer), Livius / Livy (envy), Serge (servant - I suppose it depends on context), Ptolemy (aggressive), and surnames like Mallory, Cameron, and Kennedy.

This message was edited 12/15/2010, 4:03 PM

In Mongolia it used to be common with negative names for a child born after you had lost one. You could for example call a child Nergui (no name), No-one-there, Not-this-one or that like. This also used to be common in China, where children (usually boys which were seen as better) were called ghastly things like Swine Urine and Cat Vomit - or got girls' names...
This was to prevent evil spirits from taking the child and make them think that it was unloved and hence not very "fun" to take.
In some African cultures this is still common and a child can be called "Will not live for long" or "Plague".

You have to look at each particular name to understand why a word with that meaning developed into a given name.

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For the Spanish names you mention, most of them are "Marian devotion" names which come from titles of the Virgin Mary. Originally the full name was something like "Maria de los Dolores" (Mary of the Sorrows), and it was only gradually from shortening that full form that Dolores by itself became a given name.

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Claudius wasn't a given name originally but a family name which indicated an ancestor was lame. It was nickname which developed into a family name, and then only later became a given name in honor of particular members of the Claudius family.

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I think most of the Italian names would go back to a similar religious origin like the Spanish ones. I must say that whether a particular term is "negative" or not is also subjective and influenced by both cultural and personal factors. I am very surprised to see you include Modesto in your list, because to me modesty is a highly valuable and positive trait.