If you live in Ottawa, Hamilton-Niagara, or the Greater Toronto Area, and you want to see maps of the most popular baby names in your city sorted by postal code, when definitely check out The Baby File over at Canadian news site OpenFile.
At OpenFile’s request, Ontario’s Registrar General crunched five years of birth registration data, covering 823,000 children born between 2005 and mid-December 2009. The data provided shows the top five baby names for boys and girls by postal forward sortation area — or FSA, the first three characters of a postal code—so long as the total number of babies with that name was ten or more.
Looks like many of the neighborhoods have similar name preferences, though a handful are wildly different from the norm. (An example would be FSA M6K in Toronto, where the Tibetan name Tenzin is the top baby name for both boys and girls.)
And don’t forget to scroll down to the user-submitted name stories below the maps. I spotted several interesting pop culture references, but this was the story I liked best:
My husband and I met at Victoria College, U of T, in a Victorian literature class, and married on Victoria Day. Naturally, our daughter’s name is…Victoria.
For those who live in one of the featured neighborhoods/postal codes: Are the top baby names in your area what you expected them to be, or did they surprise you?
Update: OpenFile went offline in early 2013, so the maps are no longer available, unfortunately. The links above will take you to Internet Archive captures of the original website.
I think I may have squealed a little when I saw this! I live in the Hamilton-Niagara area and have had a really hard time finding out what names are popular in my area. I wasn’t that surprised by the list in my area code except that Owen was the number one boys name (which is all the way down at 51 on the U.S. Social Security list) and that Jacob didn’t even make the top 5! Who would have thought?
List from my area code (number on the U.S. S.S.A List):
1. Olivia (3)
2. Grace (17)
3. Ava (5)
4. Emma (2)
5. Isabella (1)
1. Owen (51)
2. Joshua (6)
3. Matthew (13)
4. Aiden (12)
5. Daniel (7)
SQUEEEE! I can’t say that I’d have predicted the results exactly, but none of the top 5 surprise me at all. I’ll quote the SSA ranking for 2007 since the Toronto data covers 2005-2009. Unfortunately, my area code has too few babies (or possibly too large a selection of names) for more than one result:
1.ETHAN (3)
But our close friends live in a Toronto neighbourhood we might choose. Their postal code’s rankings were:
1) CHARLOTTE (101)
2) ELLA (21 )
3) MAYA (62)
4) AVA (4 )
5) EMMA (3)
1) WILLIAM (8)
2) ALEXANDER (11)
3) SAMUEL (25 )
4) BENJAMIN (26 )
5) JACK (38)
In my hometown neighbourhood in Ottawa, it’s a lot closer to the US results, except for Owen:
1) ABIGAIL (8)
1) ETHAN (3)
2) JACOB (1)
3) RYAN (16)
4) NOAH (14)
5) OWEN (56)
The OpenFile folks have put together a list of their favorite baby name stories so far.