General Concepts

No, really, what is it?

Although at first it may seem like the best place to go for data on popular names would be the Census Bureau, the agency that provides the best data is actually the Social Security Administration. The reason for this becomes obvious when you think about it: the census is only taken every ten years, and then is kept confidential for another 72. The SSA, however, receives applications for Social Security cards for newborns and has data going back to 1879, though it is incomplete until 1937. [1]

The data is only as perfect as the person filling out the card, however. If the sex is not given for a new baby Graham, it will not be counted if you were to search the database for male Grahams born in that year. There is no attempt to combine names that are spelled differently (Elizabeth and Elisabeth), so if the name being searched has multiple spellings, you have to search all of them separately and combine the results.

Also, you can only search the 1000 most popular names for a year. If you are looking at a range of years and the name was out of the top 1000, there will be a footnote explaining it was not on the list. The SSA explains that if they were to include more than that, it would put a strain on both their privacy policies and their web servers. [2]

Scope of this site

This site will give a basic overview of the Popular Baby Names site. It is not intended for serious geneological use; possible uses may include:

The Sections

The Baby Names page offers three main access points to their data:

  1. By year
  2. By name
  3. By state
  4. Other areas, not as useful but still interesting
  5. Conclusion

This site will go through the sections in order, or you can follow the links above to skip directly to the section you want.

References

  1. Background information for popular names: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/background.html
  2. Limitations on Popular Name Data: http://ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/limits.html