How popular is the baby name John in the United States right now? How popular was it historically? Use the popularity graph and data table below to find out! Plus, see all the blog posts that mention the name John.
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In February of 2010, Tropical Cyclone Rene brushed past American Samoa in the South Pacific. The storm came closest to the U.S. territory on February 13.
The night before, a baby girl was born at American Samoa’s LBJ Tropical Medical Center.
The hospital’s emergency team had been camping at the hospital in preparation for the cyclone that night.
The head of the delivery department, Dr. John Ah Ching, says the mother came in with complications and having all the necessary staff present may have saved the baby’s life.
I don’t know the baby’s full name, but she was “named after Cyclone Rene,” according to my source.
P.S. The Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) Tropical Medical Center, which was named after the first and only U.S. president to visit American Samoa, opened in June of 1968. “The first admitted patient was a baby about to be delivered. He received the name Lyndon.”
Did you know that you can find old vital statistics reports for the City of Philadelphia on the city’s website? And that most of these reports include baby name rankings?
I don’t want you to have to comb through a bunch of PDFs to find Philly’s historical top-ten lists, though, so — just as with New York City and Austin — I gathered all of them into a single blog post.
I was able to track down eleven sets of rankings — six covering 2005 to 2010, five covering 2012 to 2016. Eight of them also happen to include total numbers of babies.
2016
The most popular baby names in Philadelphia in 2016.
Finally, because Philadelphia and New York City are relatively close to one another, I thought I’d compare/contrast the rankings above with the NYC rankings for the same years (2005 to 2016, excluding 2011).
Parents in both cities often liked the same names, but not always at the same time, or to the same degree. During the years that Kayla ranked #1 in Philly, for instance, it was already on the decline in NYC.
Here are all the names that reached the top 10 at least twice in one city, but zero times in the other city:
Roxanne with great-great-great-granddaughter Trina
In mid-1972, Life magazine ran a photo of six females — mothers and daughters spanning six generations within a single family. The oldest was 100; the youngest was not yet one.
All six live within a one-hundred mile radius of the 90-acre farm in the flatlands of southern Alabama where Mrs. [Roxanne] Steele, now the matriarch of a clan so vast that no one has counted it, was born.
Here are the birth names of the six females (five women and one baby):
Roxanne Kennedy (b. 1871), who, with David Steele, had a daughter named…
Stella Steele (b. 1898), who, with John Godwin, had a daughter named…
Geneva Godwin (b. 1918), who, with Rayburn Moye, had a daughter named…
Rita Moye (b. 1935), who, with Ples Booth, had a daughter named…
Shirley Ann Booth (b. 1953), who, with William Byerly, had a daughter named…
Trina Roxanne Byerly (b. 1970)
Which of their names — Roxanne, Stella, Geneva, Rita, Shirley, or Trina — do you like best? Why?
The baby name Cherylene saw peak usage in the U.S. in 1946:
1948: 11 baby girls named Cherylene
1947: 20 baby girls named Cherylene
1946: 56 baby girls named Cherylene
1945: unlisted
1944: 7 baby girls named Cherylene
The name Cheryl was very trendy in the mid-1940s, and 1946 happened to be the first year of the post-war baby boom. But I think there’s a more specific reason for Cherylene’s impressive usage.
The reason?
A two-month-old Australian baby named Cherylene Robison, whose picture was published in a number of U.S. newspapers that January.
Doctors in Australia had determined that Cherylene needed life-saving cranial surgery. (Her fontanelle had not closed.)
So Cherylene and her mother, Rona, took a multi-leg “mercy flight” from Perth to Oakland (via Brisbane and Honolulu) courtesy of the U.S. military.
While they traveled east by plane, Cherylene’s father, American ex-serviceman Robert J. Robison, traveled west by train (from Kansas) to meet them.
Soon after the baby arrived, she was examined by doctors at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco. They concluded that she did not need an operation after all.
At the time of the 1950 U.S. Census, the Robison family was living together in San Mateo, California, and 4-year-old Cherylene had two younger siblings, Teresa and Reginald.
What are your thoughts on the name Cherylene?
P.S. Some of the 1960s usage of the name may have been influenced by child actress Cherylene Lee (b. 1953). She had a role in the 1963 John Wayne movie Donovan’s Reef, for instance.
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