InDaily’s interactive baby name grapher calls on more almost 70 years of State Records to allow people to get an insight into just how popular their name has been in South Australia since the 1940s.
The interactive tool lets you see how many children were given a particular first name in a particular year, and compare the popularity of different names over the years.
Premier Jay Weatherill will be pleased to know his first name peaked in 1982 – almost 20 years after he was born – at 21 named children, and has held relatively steady since. There’s evidence that the name is making a comeback, through – perhaps the families of our state are inspired by his example?
Opposition Leader Steven Marshall, meanwhile, was born only five years after ‘peak Steven’ in 1963. But since then his name has tanked heavily, first dipping below the number of ‘Jays’ being born in 2002.
The name data can also be used to trace South Australia’s migration history. Watch how the name graph changes as different waves of migration reach our shores.
Is your name Helen? Any chance you called your child Chloe? You wouldn’t be alone – Helen is amongst the most popular girls names since 1944, while Chloe is right up there amongst the most popular names given to kids born in the last 20 years.
Since 1944, the ten most popular female baby names have been Christine, Elizabeth, Helen, Jennifer, Jessica, Julie, Margaret, Rebecca, Sarah and Susan.
But between 1992 and 2012 the ten most popular were Charlotte, Chloe, Emily, Emma, Georgia, Hannah, Jessica, Olivia, Sarah and Sophie.
How to use the Interactive Baby Name Grapher
- Type a name into the search box in the top right corner of the interactive
- Press enter. A drop down list of names will appear. Click the check-box to the left of the names you wish to display
- Wait for your results to appear. You can mouse over the graphic to reveal the exact number of children given a particular name in each year
- You can graph multiple different names against each other. Simply type another name into the box, press enter, and select the name you’d like to add
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The data has been released by the State Government to the public as part of the Government’s open data push. It is available on the Government’s official public data repository data.sa.gov.au
