Old-fashioned Baby Names

They say everything eventually comes back into style, but does that include names? Go into any retirement center in the country and you will find a plethora of Gerties (short for Gertrude), Louisas, Edwins and Cliffords. Why would names, once forgotten or even made fun of, come back into vogue again?

Matthew Rayback, editor for Ancestry.com as well as the author of Bad Baby Names: The Worst True Names Parents Saddled Their Kids With – And You Can Too! (Ancestry.com, 2008), says there's a difference in old-fashioned names. "Well, there's old-fashioned and then there's old-fashioned," says Rayback. "Many of the historically popular names (like William or Elizabeth) are still quite popular today. William, for example, which was the second most popular boys' name in America in the period from 1900 to 1909, was still the eighth most popular name in 2007. Elizabeth is similar, moving from sixth to 10th. But of course, many names that were popular in past years sound funny to us today, names like Ernest, Myrtle, Herman, Agnes, Floyd, Blanche, Chester and Beulah."

Rayback goes on to say there are also old-fashioned names that, while they themselves were not necessarily popular, came from popular naming trends of the times. For example, Biblical names have been popular for a long time, and so many children in the 19th century had names like Moses, Solomon or Dorcas.

According to Rayback, naming conventions and trends are very different today than they were in the past. "Historically, people gave a lot more consideration to the meaning of a name," Rayback says. "This accounts for the fact that, in the period of 1900 to 1909, all of the top 10 most popular names in America for both boys and girls can be classified as either Biblical names, the names of Catholic saints or the names of European (typically English) royalty. But it also accounts for names like Diligence, Obedient, Good, Pleasance and even awful-sounding names like Lust, Sin, Evil, Gossip and Penance."

Today, one of the motivating factors is the way a name sounds or perhaps even the effect the name will have on others. Many people today strive to set both themselves and their children apart from the prevailing trends by giving them old-fashioned (or in some cases strange-sounding) names.

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