How popular is the baby name Woodrow 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 Woodrow.
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Jonathan Jasper “Jack” Sullivan married Bertha Phillips in early 1909. The North Carolina farm couple went on to have sixteen children — nine sons and seven daughters. Their names, in order, were…
Cretta (born in 1910)
Leland (1912)
Rosa (1913)
Woodrow (1916)
Wilmar (1918)
Joseph (1919)
Dorothy (1921)
Virginia (1923)
Irving (1924)
Blanche (1925)
C.D. (1927)
Geraldine (1928)
Marverine (1930)
Billy (1932)
Tom (1934)
Gene (1938)
Here’s more about Gene’s name:
Gene Autry Sullivan, the youngest of the children and the one who organizes the [family] reunion each year, said he was told he was named after legendary cowboy movie star Gene Autry “because his parents had run out of names by then.”
Haile debuted as a boy name in the U.S. baby name data in 1935, showed up again the next year, then it dropped out of the data entirely until the 1970s.
1937: unlisted
1936: 7 baby boys named Haile
1935: 11 baby boys named Haile [debut]
1934: unlisted
1933: unlisted
What put this name on the map in the 1930s?
Haile Selassie (pronounced HIE-lee suh-LAS-ee), the emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to the mid-1970s.
He was born into a noble family in 1892 with the name Tafari Makonnen. In 1917, he was given the title Ras, meaning “head” or “chief” in Ge’ez (the ancient Semitic language used as the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church). When he ascended to the throne, he took the regnal name Haile Selassie — Haile meaning “power of” and Selassie meaning “trinity” in Ge’ez.
So what brought him to the attention of Americans in the mid-1930s?
War.
In October of 1935, following months of conflict between Fascist Italy and Ethiopia, Italian forces under Benito Mussolini finally invaded Ethiopia, triggering the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-1937).
Several months later, Selassie was declared Time‘s latest “Man of the Year.” The magazine had this to say about Selassie:
In 1935 there was just one man who rose out of murky obscurity and carried his country with him up & up into brilliant focus before a pop-eyed world. But for the hidden astuteness of this man, there would not now be the possibility of another world war arising out of idealism generated around the League of Nations in behalf of Ethiopia. […] If by some unhappy chance the Italo-Ethiopian war should now spread into a world conflagration, [he] will have a place in history as secure as Woodrow Wilson’s. If it ends in the fall of Mussolini and the collapse of Fascism, his Majesty can plume himself on one of the greatest feats ever credited to blackamoors.
In May of 1936, Selassie was forced into exile. The next month, he appealed to the League of Nations for help, giving a memorable speech (“a magnificent but futile gesture” according to the NYT) that ominously ended: “It is us today. It will be you tomorrow.” He wasn’t able to return to his country until the early 1940s, when the world was embroiled in WWII.
The Rastafari religion, which developed in Jamaica in the 1930s after Selassie’s coronation, holds that “Haile Selassie is God, and that he will return to Africa members of the black community who are living in exile as the result of colonisation and the slave trade.”
What are your thoughts on the name Haile? (Do you think most people who see it would mistake it for a variant of Hailey?)
P.S. Both Tafari and Selassie have surfaced in the U.S. baby name data as well.
Sources:
“Ethiopia: Man of the Year: Haile Selassie.” Time 6 Jan. 1936: 14-15.
Gates, Henry Louis and Appiah, Anthony. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
The intriguing name Carranza was a one-hit wonder in the U.S. baby name data back in 1914:
1916: unlisted
1915: unlisted
1914: 5 baby boys named Carranza
1913: unlisted
1912: unlisted
Data from the U.S. Social Security Death Index likewise indicates that the name saw higher usage that year:
1917: 2 people with the first name Carranza
1916: 6 people with the first name Carranza
1915: 3 people with the first name Carranza
1914: 9 people with the first name Carranza
1913: 3 people with the first name Carranza
1912: none
1911: none
What was drawing attention to the Spanish surname Carranza around that time?
My guess is Venustiano Carranza, one of the leaders of the ongoing Mexican Revolution (1910-1920).
Carranza became the provisional president of Mexico following the overthrow of Victoriano Huerta in the summer of 1914. (He went on to become the constitutional president in 1917.)
The transition from Huerta to Carranza happened during the months of 1914 that the U.S. military was occupying the Mexican port city of Veracruz. Woodrow Wilson refused to recognize Huerta’s government, but did eventually recognize Carranza’s (in late 1915).
The Spanish surname Carranza can be traced back to the Basque place-name Karrantza — both a valley and a village in the province of Biscay (Vizcaya) in northern Spain.
And Carranza’s interesting first name? It’s based on the Latin word venustus, meaning “lovely, comely, charming.” Venustus is derived from Venus, the name of the Roman goddess of love.
What are your thoughts on Carranza as a first name?
The U.S. National Park Service has a birthday coming up!
When the NPS was created on August 25, 1916, there were only 35 national parks and monuments. (The world’s first, Yellowstone, had been established in 1872.)
Nowadays the agency oversees 411 units. These units are located in the 50 states and beyond, and include national monuments (82), national historic sites (78), national parks (59), national historical parks (50), national memorials (30), national battlefields (11), national seashores (10), national lakeshores (4), national scenic trails (3), and more.
Let’s celebrate the upcoming centennial with more than 100 baby names that pay tribute to the national parks specifically:
The derivation of Kenai is unknown, but it could come from either Dena’ina Athabascan (“big flat” or “two big flats and river cut-back” or “trees and brush in a swampy marsh”), Russian (“flat barren land”), or Iniut (“black bear”).
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