How popular is the baby name Arbutus 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 Arbutus.

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Popularity of the baby name Arbutus


Posts that mention the name Arbutus

Where did the baby name Seroba come from in 1927?

Newspaper photo and caption, "Radio Baby," (May, 1927)
Seroba Mary Lou in the newspaper, mid-1927

A week or so ago I came across a curious one-hit wonder name from 1927: Seroba.

For context, 1927 was the year Lindbergh became big news, the year both Sunya and Jobyna debuted, and the year Arbutus nearly cracked the top 1,000.

So I started doing some research, and you know what kept coming up in the search results? A bunch of news items about Mary Lou Bartley.

Who’s Mary Lou Bartley? If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you might remember her from that post about radio-crowdsourced baby names.

Mary Lou was born in Kentucky in early 1927. Her parents had asked a radio station to help them name their baby. The station aired the request, and the result was hundreds of baby name suggestions from across the nation. This is the earliest (complete) example of baby name crowdsourcing that I know of.

What did Seroba have to do with Mary Lou Bartley, though?

That’s what I wanted to know. So I read through the news items, all from 1927, and realized that each one was calling her “Seroba Mary Lou.” Which was strange, as all the sources I’d used to reconstruct Mary Lou’s story for that crowdsourcing post — everything from the 1930 census all the way to her 2009 obituary — referred to her simply as “Mary Lou.”

Here’s a caption that ran in one newspaper:

Seroba Mary Lou Bartley of Whitesburg, Ky., who has the distinction of being the first baby to be christened over the radio.

And here’s an excerpt from an article that ran in another:

During the evening [of the radio broadcast] two thousand names were suggested by the listeners, and the suggestions came from almost as many places. There were many who preferred the quiet dignity of “Mary,” and as many who were interested in a name as modern as “Mitzi.” All of the suggestions were forwarded to the Bartleys and after much thought they conferred on the little newcomer, this name suggested by the radio — Seroba Mary Lou. Long live this Virginia Dare of radio!

I have no idea where the name Seroba came from. Was it part of the crowdsourced name? Did a newspaper reporter make it up? I also can’t figure out why some newspapers mentioned it and others did not.

Regardless, the Seroba-version of Mary Lou’s story was circulated widely enough to boost the baby name Seroba onto the charts for a single year:

  • 1929: unlisted
  • 1928: unlisted
  • 1927: 8 baby girls named Seroba [debut]
  • 1926: unlisted
  • 1925: unlisted

So that’s the explanation behind the one-hit wonder baby name Seroba. How crazy that it connects to a name we discussed for an entirely different reason more than three years ago.

What are your thoughts on the name Seroba — do you like it? Dislike it? Have you ever heard of it before?

Sources:

  • Radio Baby.” Sausalito News 28 May 1927: 3.
  • “WLS Listeners Name Kentucky Babe.” Wyoming Reporter [Wyoming, NY] 1 Jun. 1927: 3.

P.S. Usage of the baby name Marylou spiked in 1927 as well…

Arbutus, the flower name you’ve never heard of

trailing arbutus

Lily, Daisy, Jasmine, Rose…Arbutus?

When I first spotted “Arbutus” in the U.S. baby name data, I’ll admit I had no idea what I was looking at. A myth name? A misspelling?

Turns out it’s a flower name.

“Arbutus,” the Latin word for strawberry tree, today commonly refers to the fragrant trailing arbutus, which was once (but is no longer) classified in the genus Arbutus.

Trailing arbutus (a.k.a. Epigaea repens, mayflower) is the official floral emblem of both Massachusetts and Nova Scotia.

Graph of the usage of the baby name Arbutus in the U.S. since 1880
Usage of the baby name Arbutus

The baby name Arbutus, very rare nowadays, was given to dozens of baby girls every year from the 1910s to the 1940s. In 1927, it ranked 1,081st — just a few babies away from top-1,000 status.

Some people even got “Trailing Arbutus” as a name. I’ve found two women in West Virginia marriage records named Trailing Arbutus, and H. L. Mencken mentions a Trailing Arbutus — surname Vines, incredibly — in Tennessee.

Do you like the name Arbutus? Would you ever consider using it?

Image: Adapted from Epigaea repens (Trailing arbutus) by Fritz Flohr Reynolds under CC BY-SA 3.0.