The Science of Baby-Name Trends
https://daily.jstor.org/science-baby-names/ What makes a name suddenly pop — and then die? Social scientists and historians have been puzzling over this for decades. |
Here are some tools that you can use to explore the changes across time.
Baby Name Wizard
The Name Voyager gives a quick overview of how the popularity of individual names has varied in the last 140 years. The Name Voyager Expert allows you to work with a subset of names by specifying their period of peak popularity, so you can (for example) see which names that were big in the 1940s retained that attraction into the 1970s. https://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager https://www.babynamewizard.com/namevoyager-expert Behind The Name Although Baby Name Wizard has some links to particularly Australian datasets, you can obtain more detail at this site.. Use the menu items Names >Popularity > Australia to locate the top 200 names (100 each for boys and girls) in New South Wales in each of the past 29 years. https://www.behindthename.com/ https://www.behindthename.com/top/lists/australia-nsw/2007 US Social Security Administration Not surprisingly, this US government agency has an enormous database of names in use and provides some snapshots here. Since they do things "bigger and better", you can scan lists of the most popular 400 names in a time period. Naturally, you can compare results by state as well as time period. What does it mean that there were 81 little Nevaehs registered in Alabama in 2018, but only 56 in Oklahoma and none in Delaware? https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/index.html |
The Telegraph
This UK newspaper opted for an international perspective in its coverage. However considering more countries means that you get fewer names per country https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/lists/most-popular-names-around-the-world-what-they-mean/ Wolfram Alpha If you want to try some freeform investigation supported by artifical intelligence software running on some big powerful processors, then visit Wolfram Alpha. On that page, select a pre-packaged question from the options to see what is on offer. Then simply type your choice of names into the box to create your own comparison. (Remember that the underlying data is all North American. And that entering too many names at one time will use more computer resources and prompt the system to ask you to sign up for a paid account.) https://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/society-and-culture/people/names/ |
So what types of questions might you investigate concerning names in your tree. Try some of these or invent your own questions and bring along the results.
- What is the most common given name in your tree?
- Is it (mainly) restricted to one surname line or shared by several?
- How many times does your given name appear in your tree?
- Who was the most recent carrier of the name (before you)?
- What is the earliest occurrence of your given name in your tree?
- Is the earliest known carrier of your name a direct ancestor (or a sibling of your direct ancestor)?
- What is the greatest number of successive generations in which the name was used by at least one person?
- Can you identify a given name that was used several times in your family but has since dropped out of favour?
- When was the last (recorded) death of a person known by that name?
- What factors influenced the names you gave to your children?
- Is there a recognisable pattern of name re-use (such as second son named for maternal grandfather) evident in (some parts of) your tree?
- Are there instances in your tree of multiple living children with the same initial given name (Mary Ann, Mary Jane) in the same family?
- How many instances of the reuse of a given name in a single generation of a family (when the first child given the name died) are there in your tree?
- What is the largest number of individuals with the same name in a single generation of your extended family (such as cousins named for their common grandfather)?
- Are there instances in your tree of a maternal surname being used as a given name (not necessarily the initial one)?
- Did it continue to be used in subsequent generations? For how long?
- Does your tree include any instances of the child given the surname of his or her (unmarried) mother but with given names that suggest the identity of the father?
- Do you have evidence of a child being known by a name other than their "official" first name during the lifetime of an older family member with the same name?