[drlevy88]

Cleveland Evans, a psychology professor at Nebraska's Bellevue University and a member of the American Name Society, studied Social Security records for the year 2000 and found that many children today are being named after consumer products.

Social Security??? I didn't know they even kept a publicly viewable list-of-citizens.

[Moonmad27]

You can find a Social Security list of most popular names for this year and previous ones, but it's not related to individual people. I needed a list of the top 500 or so baby names to suggest as my office prepares birth certificates, and found that Social Security site by Google. As I sign finished certificates, I just feel so sorry for some of the new babies because of their parents' bad choice of names, especially cringing at Britney and any deliberately misspelled names. I guess it's always that way. The lists of past years are interesting - I remember my school classmates were often named Debbie, Karen or Carol, and those names sure aren't high on the list these days.

[Held_to_Ransom]

Social Security??? I didn't know they even kept a publicly viewable list-of-citizens.

They probably publish abstracts of their data. Probably even a list of all the names used and how many times they occurred in their list. A mere simple database query.

So much for the depth of what passes for research.

[WaterDragon]

So, was Cleveland Evans born in the era when parents named their babies after cities?