First off, if this type of post isn’t allowed please let me know and I’ll remove it.
If you’re a name nerd like me, you might enjoy delving deep into the SSA’s popularity data which they release every year usually around Mother’s Day. The SSA website has some features which make it easy to track names which fall in the top 1000. However, they also release a “beyond the top 1000” full dataset of all names that were used at least 5 times in that year. The data looks like this.
It’s fascinating to sift through, but as you can see, following the trajectory of a specific name outside of the top 1000 through multiple years is difficult. There are some sites that allow you to search for the popularity of a specific name so that you can see its trajectory over time. One of these is the SSA website itself, but it only lists names in the top 1000.
Behindthename also has a popularity graph feature and it’s particularly useful as it also includes other countries besides the United States. However, again, it only shows data for the top 1000 names.
For a long time I used a site called Ourbabynamer’s popularity feature, which featured a graph and a table for all names in the data, even outside of the top 1000. It was perfect for me to research trends and trajectories of individual names because even if they dipped out of the top 1000 they still showed up on the graph/table.
However, I don’t believe Ourbabynamer is actively monitored anymore. As you can see from the screenshot, the most recent year that data is available for is 2018. The site hasn’t seemed to be updated since 2018/2019, and an email I sent to the web administrators was returned as undeliverable. I love their interface for researching name data, but it has not been updated in 5 years and will likely go offline at some point since it seems it’s not being monitored or kept up with?
For more recent data, I have been starting to use nancy.cc. She uses the SSA data directly and also has a graph/table that tracks names outside of the top 1000. I grew used to the Ourbabynamer interface, but Nancy’s interface also gets the job done.
The main issue with Nancy’s website is that there is no direct search to find a name. I have to fiddle around and scroll through long lists of names to find the one that I want. I really liked Ourbabynamer because it was so simple to just type in a name and have all the data pop up right away - super quick and easy. Nancy’s interface has the data available but it’s a little more time consuming to access.
Is anyone aware of a site that shows graphs/tables of SSA data outside the top 1000 that lets you easily and quickly search for names? I’d love to find a great replacement for Ourbabynamer since unfortunately it looks abandoned.