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Help[Facts] Re: Mr Susan
in reply to a message by Anneza
I assume you are looking at the SSA lists as your "charts."
The quality of the data here deteriorates the farther back in time you go. It is quite obvious from the names you have found that there simply were a lot of mistakes made in the gender code when the original data for Social Security was entered into the SSA computer system. There is no way that there were as many boys given the popular girls' names like Susan, Mary, Elizabeth, Deborah, etc. as the SSA data says.
To look at one early year at random: the SSA top 1000 list for 1890 has 9 of the top 10 names for girls (Mary, Anna, Elizabeth, Margaret, Emma, Florence, Ethel, Minnie, and Bertha) are also on the boys' list; and the top 11 boys' names (John, William, James, George, Charles, Frank, Joseph, Robert, Henry, Harry, and Edward)also appear on the girls' list. Though I have run across very rare examples of girls named George, Frank, James, and Harry -- and Florence was used in earlier centuries as a male name in Ireland --
it is highly unlikely that the above pattern reflects reality, but much more likely that it's the result of errors made in typing the gender code in the original SSA data.
The quality of the data here deteriorates the farther back in time you go. It is quite obvious from the names you have found that there simply were a lot of mistakes made in the gender code when the original data for Social Security was entered into the SSA computer system. There is no way that there were as many boys given the popular girls' names like Susan, Mary, Elizabeth, Deborah, etc. as the SSA data says.
To look at one early year at random: the SSA top 1000 list for 1890 has 9 of the top 10 names for girls (Mary, Anna, Elizabeth, Margaret, Emma, Florence, Ethel, Minnie, and Bertha) are also on the boys' list; and the top 11 boys' names (John, William, James, George, Charles, Frank, Joseph, Robert, Henry, Harry, and Edward)also appear on the girls' list. Though I have run across very rare examples of girls named George, Frank, James, and Harry -- and Florence was used in earlier centuries as a male name in Ireland --
it is highly unlikely that the above pattern reflects reality, but much more likely that it's the result of errors made in typing the gender code in the original SSA data.
This message was edited 1/18/2006, 9:48 AM
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