You know when you were in class and the teacher would go through the roll and call, ‘Jess’ and four girls in the class would collectively chime ‘here’ and then the teacher would say, ‘NO, I MEAN JESS H!’
We all know that baby names follow trends but this particular depiction of the data is kind of amazing. It shows the most popular girl baby’s name, by state, over a period of almost 100 years.
The map is the brainchild of a dad in the US named Michael Shackleford, who was determined to name his child something to separate them from the pack. He had access to US Social Security data and wrote a program that sorted the information by year of birth, gender and first name.
This made it easy to see data, such as in 1990, ‘Michael’ and ‘Jessica’ were the most popular names. He says, “I knew that my eyeballs were seeing this list of the most popular baby names nationwide for the first time… It was too good to keep to myself.”
Mamamia has compiled a list of the most popular names in Australia from 1960 to now, sourced from the Australian Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages. So now all we need is some smart person to turn it into a fancy infographic – any takers?
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My mum is a teacher and has taught at a few schools overseas as my family lived overseas. One of her friends teaching in Spain used to complain that half of her class was called Maria. There were even two identical twins called something like Maria Sofia and Maria Elena (or something like that). When she asked if she could call them by their second names they refused and both said that their name was Maria. Crazy.
I was the only Matilda for a long time, born 1990. It has become more popular in the last few years so now whenever I hear it I think they are calling me haha!