Popularity of given names through the ages

Question

Wikipedia has articles about given names (example: John).

In each of these articles, I would like to add a histogram showing how popular the name has been through the ages. For each year, it could be the number or proportion of children who received this name.

Where can I find data for this?

Requirements:

• Must be reusable in Wikipedia (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
• Since as far back as possible, for instance there have been Johns since 134BC at least. Estimation data is OK.
• Some will argue that John was actually spelt another way and should be considered another name. Any stance is fine, as long as the data stays consistent with the stance they have chosen.
• I am looking for data for the whole world, but dataset for parts of it (for instance Chinese names only) are welcome too.

Answer 1

Here You have names with the popularity in capital city of Poland: Popularne imiona w Warszawie

Answer 2

For data beyond the SSA dataset (that goes back to 1880, but has full coverage only back to 1932), you may look at this site

http://www.galbithink.org/names/agnames.htm

providing names for US census data and from British sources. Note that some data are normalised (fortunately the normalisation patterns are Open Source, so you can inspect them and make up your judgement).

Answer 3

For the USA there is another great source on names: The Social Security Death Index (SSDI). Especially it fills the sparseness in the SSA data predating 1932.

As the name tells, it contains only data of deceased people, not of the ones still alive.

EDIT: The Social Security Master Death File (SSDMF) is available from http://ssdmf.info/ It contains Names, Day of Birth and Day of Death. Data go back to 1800 (but the oldest points are probably input errors).

P.S. Note that only the first 10 letters of the given name are recorded in the SSDMF: You find no CHRISOTPHER, but lots of CHRISTOPHE's.

Answer 4

For the USA, the Social Security Administration has statistics going back to 1880.

The whole national data is downloadable in a ZIP file available for download at http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/limits.html
Direct link: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/names.zip

Excerpt:

yob1880.txt:

Mary,F,7065
Anna,F,2604
Emma,F,2003
Elizabeth,F,1939
Minnie,F,1746

License: Public domain per http://www.ssa.gov/agency/websitepolicies.html#a0=7