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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