Naming Your Baby: Is Popularity a Bad Thing?by Kimmama | More from this Blogger 28 Aug 2009 10:53 AM Did you know Jacob has been the number one boy's name in the US since 1999? Ironically this is one of the names my husband and I have chosen as a possibility if we have another boy. Now I'm not so sure. Considering how popular the name is, he may have a hard time in school when the teachers do roll call. Emily was the number one girls name every year from 1996 to 2007. Guess which girls name ranked number one from 1909 to 1946? The answer is at the end of this blog.
My husband and I like to strike a balance. We don't pick names from a baby name book; we pull up the Social Security website and view the list of names for the previous year. Anything in the top ten is automatically out. Any names already used by a family member are out. Anything after #200 is likely an alternate spelling for a more popular name (which can confuse a child) or is too odd for our tastes. Names that remind us of people we don't care to be reminded of are also crossed off the list. Remaining names are weighed against each other based on a number of different criteria. Does it sound good with our last name? Can we think of a good middle name to go with it? Can we picture ourselves saying this name hundreds of times per day? That essentially is our baby naming strategy. Popularity does certainly play a role when choosing a name for our children. We don't want them to get lost in the shuffle of Ashley's or be ridiculed for the rest of their lives either. Do you care how popular your baby's name is? Oh, and the number one name from 1909 to 1946 for girls? It's Mary. Learn more about Kimmama  Kim is a freelance writer and stay at home mom to her newborn, Micah. She has been married to her husband, Eric, since 2006. Relevantbaby tags User Comments Heidi (5269) 28 Aug 2009 02:50 PMWe'd picked out our son's name (Joshua) nearly 2 years before he was born and found out after we fell in love with it that it was in the "Top 10" We've never met another Joshua that isn't a few years older than him, and he's 3 now so that was a deep sigh of relief. We didn't want there to be 5 Joshua's in the same class at school. That being said, when our daughter was born we searched what top names are in our state to more accurately guess how popular the name is because some vary by region. We ended up finding out that the year our son was born there were only 473 other Joshua's born that year--eventhough it was #9. Our daughter's name is #28 for last year and there were only 166 other little girls with that name. SarahPirolli (181) 28 Aug 2009 05:08 PMPopularity was definitely a factor when we picked out baby names. Being named Sarah, I've dealt with being "lost in the shuffle" my entire life. I was rarely anywhere without at least one other Sarah around. But popularity of a name probably wouldn't totally stop us if we were in love with a certain name. My main criteria was that I wanted a Biblical name. I absolutely loved that about my name growing up. The story of Abraham and Sarah was always dear to my heart. I wanted my child to be named after someone great... someone worthy of mention in the greatest book of all time. Once a list of potential Biblical names was established, they were eliminated based on people we knew, family members (I loved the name Hannah, but my brother's daughter got to it first), or how the name might be shortened (I like Andrew but not Andy)... and tons of other little factors like how it sounded, what it meant, and simply how we felt about the name. For the middle name I liked the idea of having something from the family. The name of a parent or grandparent. Something that would tie our child in somehow with another relative. So in the end, we settled on the first name of Lydia (one of the great women of faith in the early church) and middle name of Beth (also my middle name).  ruthann8 (6378) 31 Aug 2009 07:28 AMWe used the social security website too! I also liked how it would list similar names too. We choose Ellamae, a form of Ella kind of like Eleanor. But Ellamae hasn't been in the top 1000 since 1922! But since Ella was popular it wouldn't seem so outdated. If we have a boy I wanted Elliott, but my husband hates it! He wants William, which has been in the top ten forever!! Discuss this article
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On the other end of the spectrum, 
