It’s easy enough to find the most popular names of a time period. Easy, but not necessarily interesting. A name like Michael, which spent half a century at #1, doesn’t capture the unique texture of an era.
For the style timeline project my first thought was to devise a formula to calculate the relative popularity of a names in any given time period compared to the rest of the century. I’d just rank the ratios, filter out rare names, and voilà! The defining names of each era…right? No such luck.
Starting with the early Silent Generation, I quickly realized how naive my notion of “a formula” was. Back in the 1920s parents were open to trendy names for girls, but still extremely conservative with boys. As a result, a formula that successfully identified hot girls’ names could yield a blank for boys. At the other end of the timeline, the most recent eras are so splintered with creativity that its hard to find names that would pass a popularity threshold from earlier generations.
In the end, I had to custom tweak my statistical screens for each generation/gender pairing. I then eliminated duplicates across generations, avoided too-similar names (e.g. Steven/Stephen/Steve), and tried to make each set of names representative of its period’s styles. For example, if two names were statistically similar I would favor the one that sounded more like other trendy names from the same time.
The resulting name lists are 100% statistically based, but filtered through my own experience and judgement from two decades studying American baby names.
– Laura