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To my knowledge, there wasn't a famous Caitlin who made the name prominent: variants of Katharine take turns in surfacing from time to time, like all the Kathys in the 1950s whose daughters are Kates; and then there's Kathryn and Kathleen, and the very dated Kitty as a nickname. And Caitlin was just a Katharine version whose time had come; plus, as CKE says, in Wales and Ireland it doesn't sound like Kate + Lyn so people probably saw it, liked what they thought it sounded like, and so its use snowballed.

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The fact that your parents liked the 'sound' of the name but can't trace it back to a single source probably confirms this. Anyway, lucky you: most Caitlins are younger than you, so if you ever want to shed a few years or a decade or two, your name will make it easy!