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The Social Security Administration, which is the federal agency in the USA which obtains data on first names from applications for Social Security numbers, which almost every baby born in the USA gets within a few months after birth because one now needs such a number to declare a child as a dependent for federal income tax purposes.

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A former employee of the SSA named Michael Shackleford created a program a few decades ago to count up name popularity from this data, and the SSA releases annual figures for name usage based on this data, usually around the second Friday in May.