Is there a database of popular baby names that cross-references state and year?

Asked by elenuial (1407

) March 10th, 2010

The SSA archive online does both, but only back to 1980. Past that, you can only get popularity by year, but not state. Every other site that my Googlefu is getting me pretty blatantly just gets their info from the SSA.

In particular, I’m looking for popular baby names in Tennessee in 1935, but I’m somewhat flexible on year and location, so long as it’s vaguely in the right area. Besides, having a more generalized resource would be awesome.

I’ve had a small bit of luck looking up records of death to find names, but that’s like playing roulette, really.

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1 Answer

You might be able to find birth announcements in newspaper archives.

You could try calling on the memories of some people who were born then, as to what were the popular names of their generation.

Any person who was a major figure of that year or the preceding couple of years (including regionally) might have been someone to honor with a namesake. My father (born in 1919) was named after a popular evangelical preacher of his parents’ generation.

Also the top 100 popular names nationally ought to include some hits for your target region.

If you are by any chance trying to name a fictional character, would popularity (and hence commonness) for the time and place necessarily be the person’s parents’ prime criterion? The names that were most popular half a century before that, and possibly elsewhere (even in another country?), might supply a grandparent’s name as someone to be named after.

Jeruba (56034

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