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The first year I find any children listed as "Baby" is 1968, so I would assume that most applications prior to 1968 were not made at birth. However, "Unknown" appears every year and reached a peak in the 1950s when five or six hundred girls and a roughly equal number of boys every year are listed as Unknown. Any ideas on why so many people would have a first name missing, when it's not that their parents hadn't yet decided on a name? Perhaps they put only a first initial, which wasn't accepted by the SSA, so "Unknown" was substituted?

This message was edited 1/10/2011, 3:04 PM