[OC] As a Brit living in the US, I’ve always been curious about how Americans give their children the same names as some British counties (lots of Kents and Devons) but not others (no baby Middlesex or Leicestershire). So I mapped all 145 years of the Social Security Administration’s baby name data!
by Stargrazer82301
3 Comments
May is when the Social Security Administration releases the baby name data for the previous year, so now seemed to time to delve into this. I compared baby names for the [entire time span they provide](https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/baby-names-from-social-security-card-applications-national-data) (1880 to 1025) to *Historical* (pre-1844) county borders, as defined by the [Historical Counties Project](https://www.county-borders.co.uk/), and mapped it all up using the [GeoPandas](https://geopandas.org/en/stable/docs/user_guide/mapping.html) library.
Counties whose name ends in “shire” that are only used as baby names without the “shire” (eg baby Lincoln vs Lincolnshire) get only an honourable mention, and are indicated in grey. Durham vs County Durham got full credit, though.
Thoughts and prayers to every little baby Berk and Hamp.
Good one! I also think its interesting how those names ended up diverging along racial lines (Tyrone is an especially prominent example).
In the U.S., I would think the given name “Devon” is a variant of “Devin,” which comes from Irish Gaelic and is etymologically unrelated to Devonshire