Jack’s rise

I figured now that Reba is with us, I’d post this about the names of our kids. These graphs are copied from the Name Voyager website, which is well worth a visit, though it takes a little time to load.

Using Social Security Admin. info from the last 100 years or so, the popularity of names throughout the decades is tracked (assuming the name has been one of the 1000 most popular in that time. For the charts below, notice on the righthand side the scale - e.g., for Atticus, there were about 40 boys w/ that name per 1,000,000 births in 2004, while for Jack, there were about 2,000. (I realize our Jack is really John, but “Jack” is more fun to look at.)

Atticus:

Presumably on the rise because of the attention from Gregory Peck’s passing in 2003, and a well-publicized poll that showed Atticus Finch as American’s most-loved fictional character. Still, there probably won’t be too many others in his kindergarten class (though we have met a boy here in Cambridge very close to our age whose middle name is Atticus.)

Jack:

Rocketing up, I’m not sure why — yet, we too were definitely thinking about it in the early going. His name’s curve does definitely show what is apparently a very common trend, peaking every 80 years or so, or every 3 or 4 generations, as the name becomes less associated with older people as their generation passes, and the name’s connotations are freed up, in a subconscious way, for parents to use on their new young people (the classic current examples are names like Max and Sophie).

Reba:

She may be, even more than Atticus, our sweet girl who will always be able to go just by her first name (like Cher, or Charo, only different).

and, for who we thought Atty was until the sonogram showed us otherwise, Lucy:

If we were to have a girl in the future, we’re really on the fence about whether to use the name still, given its rise - though the path by which we came to the name, from a favorite character from The Chronicles of Narnia, remains the same (also, since Atty’s birth, we’ve had a great neighborhood dog friend named Lucy).

Other links of interest on naming:
Baby’s named a bad, bad thing
Trading Up - Where do baby names come from?
A Roshanda by Any Other Name
the Social Security Admin. on baby names