Saturday, July 11, 2009

Saturday's Super Site

Since I was working on a new story this week, and it's a story not quite like any I've done before, I had to do some name research. (As well as other research, but that's not the point of today's post.)

Searching for popular baby names of the 1920s... I thought I wouldn't find much, but I'm so glad I was wrong. After browsing through several such links, I came to the conclusion that the easiest one to use is put out by the Social Security Administration: Popular Baby Names.

I won't go into how ridiculous it is for taxpayer money to be used for such a purpose. (Okay, I realize that simply by saying that, I went into it. I can live with that.) Suffice it to say, the search loads quickly - even on my old computer - and the site is easy enough to use.

So, I looked up the names in the 1920s, and found a few I liked. Then I went to the 1980s, because I have characters born then, too. Then for grins and giggles, I went to 1886 - because you can look up any year past 1879. No big shocker there - John and Mary were the two most popular names.

Anyway, I got my US born characters appropriately named for the time periods they were born in because the SSA wastes money. Later I went to some privately held sites and named the foreign born characters. I should've gone private for the others, too, but I'm lazy and since the money was already wasted - part of which I'm sure I paid for - I might as well use it. You might as well, too.

Top names for the year I was born: Michael and Jennifer. What were the top names in your birth year?

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