How Social Security Became a Baby Name Influencer

The result was a 1998 research paper with a bone-dry title — “Actuarial Note 139: Name Distributions in the Social Security Area, August 1997” — and an unprecedented bonanza of information (including that Michael had indeed been the most popular name for baby boys, almost without interruption, since the early 1950s).

The SSA, quickly realizing what it had on its hands, began releasing an annual list of the previous year’s top baby names, generating widespread media coverage. The list has gained not just cachet with cultural historians but also influence among parents keen to give their kids a head start in standing out.

“When the top 10 get publicized everywhere, there’s this feedback loop where people can find out quickly what names are common,” Evans says. “Then they can avoid them.”

‘It reflects how we see ourselves’

Evans says there was no way to get an honest reckoning of national naming trends before Shackleford compiled his brief. “You had to do it state by state,” he says, “and different states had different rules.” Some states had computerized their birth records, but many had not.

With the emergence of a unified, comprehensive resource, it’s now possible to track naming customs across decades — an underappreciated way for a nation to understand its history, says Wattenberg, who writes a blog on nomenclature called Namerology.

“Baby names are one of the purest cultural indicators we have,” she says. “It’s a choice that absolutely everyone takes seriously. It’s heartfelt. It reflects how we see ourselves and what we value.”

How we see ourselves has changed a great deal. A relative handful of names dominated parental decisions through most of the 20th century. John topped the boys’ list from 1900 to 1925 before giving way to long stretches of Roberts and Michaels; Mary led the way among girls into the early ’60s, except for a brief post-World War II vogue for Linda.

Evans says this duplication reflected the conventionality of parents who lived through the Depression and the war. “It shows how conformist the history they lived through made them,” he says. “The dream was to move to the suburbs and have at least two kids named Michael and Debbie.” (While John fell off in the ’50s, it was still a big decade for Mary, and for Robert, James, David, Patricia and Susan, as well.)

One result is that boomers are much more similarly named than succeeding generations. “In the ’50s, 4 to 5 percent of boys would be named Michael,” Evans says. “Now you’re lucky if the top name gets to 1 percent of all boys born in a year.”

But as they started families of their own, boomers branched out namewise. Popular culture, from movies to TV shows to hit songs, took on a more influential role. Evans says the growing variety demonstrated a broader “increase in individualism” across society, noting, for example, how the Black Power movement of the 1960s encouraged Black parents to choose culturally relevant, often African-derived names.

“You can go back through time and see names as a kind of fossil record of culture, of what people were thinking about at that time,” Wattenberg says.

What Heather can tell us

The range of names would continue to widen. In the 1980s, girls were increasingly called Ashley, Jessica, Amanda or Sarah. Michael hung in among the boys but was frequently joined by Christopher, Matthew and Joshua.

As the new millennium dawned, Jacob and Daniel entered the boys’ pantheon; among girls, the changing of the guard was even more pronounced. Of the top five girls’ names in the 2000s — Emily, Madison, Emma, Olivia and Hannah — only the first was a top 10 name in the previous decade. Jessica, the chart-topping girl’s name of the ’90s, dropped to 23rd.

The trend toward diversity has only accelerated, dizzyingly so. Liam and Olivia have been entrenched atop the lists since the late 2010s, but parents are also bringing into the world a proliferation of Noahs, Elijahs, Amelias and Sophias, names little-heard (at least in the U.S.) a generation ago.

In 2023, Luna cracked the top 10 for girls and Mateo for boys. The fastest-rising names included Izael, Chozen, Alitzel, Emryn, Kaeli and Eiden — the latter two likely boosted by popular TikTok personalities. Fully 1 in 4 boys and 1 in 3 girls received names outside the 1,000 most common. (To an extent, that could reflect a limitation in the data: The SSA does not group names that sound the same but are spelled differently, such as Caitlin, Caitlyn, Kaitlin, Kaitlyn, Kaitlynn, Katelyn and Katelynn.)

“The typical parent, instead of seeing names as being chosen from a pool, feels a great deal of pressure to be creative and make a statement,” Wattenberg says. “Today, no name is universally popular across the country. It’s this beautiful flowering of creativity and individuality.”

Wattenberg says the SSA list has fed this phenomenon, citing as an example what she calls the “Heather generation.” That name, an exotic rarity in the first half of the 20th century, began gaining cachet in the 1960s and exploded into a top 10 perennial through most of the ’70s and ’80s.

All those parents “thought they were inventing the name,” Wattenberg says. “There was no way to tell that it was already popular, because no one was counting. Without the data from the Social Security Administration, we just never knew.” (Now we know, and Heather’s sun has set; it tumbled down the list through the 1990s and 2000s and is no longer among even the top 1,000 girls’ names.)

Michael Green, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, says all that data makes Social Security’s accidental role as keeper of the lists of names essential to historians.

“Our motherlodes are archives, and this is a great archive,” Green says. “It tells us things about the people who otherwise slip through the cracks of life.”