Sunday, April 28, 2013

Research Sunday: Age Distribution among the Names of the 1881 Women of St Ives

It's a somewhat convoluted title, but it touches upon two areas that I have been thinking about since my last post on workhouse names. First, can regionality be seen in the names given in the 1881 census, and secondly, can you see if names skew 'older' or 'younger'. In 1881, was Jane a name associated with old people or young people?

I'm going to address regionality first. With modern data, it can be easy to compare naming trends in different countries, and now, there is more information within countries about modern regional naming patterns. Baby Name Wizard has the excellent Name Mapper for US data, there used to be a good Baby Name Map but it doesn't seem to be online anymore. England and Wales now releases top 10s for each region; in Canada and Australia, the different states/territories/provinces release their own name data each year.

The 1881 census recorded where people lived and where they were born, so it's possible to take a snapshot of which names were much more popular in certain regions than others.

Some regions retain strong identities and names that are strongly linked with those regions - I've started with Cornwall. You can buy whole books about 'Cornish Names' - I wanted to find out whether any of those names was actually being used in Cornwall in 1881. I chose St Ives, and ordered the names from this page. It gave me 1615 names in total, 897 females and 718 males. There's plenty in these lists to discuss, so I'm dividing these posts into male and female to do so.

Without further ado, here are the 20 most popular female names:

Rank Name Count % Change from general population data Change in % from general population data
1 Mary 165 18.39 = +5.3%
2 Elizabeth 127 14.16 = +5.8%
3 Jane 48 5.35 +2 +6.2%
4 Catherine 40 4.46 +13 +3.3%
5 Ann 32 3.57 -2 -2.9%
6 Grace 27 3.01 +44 +2.7%
7 Annie 26 2.90 +2 +0.2%
8 Eliza 24 2.68 -1 -0.1%
9 Sarah 23 2.56 -5 -3.7%
10 Margaret 21 2.34 +1 =
11 Martha 19 2.12 +3 +0.5%
12 Alice 17 1.90 -4 -0.9%
13 Nanny 17 1.90 NEW NEW
14 Bessie 14 1.56 +49 +1.4%
15 Susan 12 1.34 +16 +0.7%
16 Kate 11 1.23 +10 +0.4%
17 Edith 9 1.00 +2 =
18 Nancy 9 1.00 +51 +0.9%
19 Wilmot 9 1.00 NEW NEW
20 Emma 8 0.89 -10 -1.8%

I'll start with the percentage data. 73.36% of the women in the St Ives sample held a name in the top 20, this is a little higher than the national average of  67.9%, but not as high as 78.8% of last week's workhouse names. So the women in St Ives were a little more uniform in their naming habits than the general population. The top 10 in St Ives is 59.4%, higher than the general population's 53%.

Regionality is clear in this list. Aside from the top few names, there are seven new names to the top 20 compared with the general population, including two (Nanny and Wilmot) which were not in the top 100 at all. Now this is a small sample, so I did consider whether Nanny and Wilmot in particular represented a family naming pattern. The same surnames were repeated frequently - it seems to have been a close knit community. However, they were from families with different surnames, and spanned ages from 67 to 4 for Wilmot and 75 to 2 for Nanny, with them fairly well distributed among the ages.

Looking at the FreeBMD records, Wilmot (a diminutive of William, could be borne by men or women) was given to 1607 people (no distinction between men and women) between 1837 and 1960 (though I think the records are patchy after about 1920). Of those 1607 people, 294 were born in Cornwall - 18.2% of Wilmots. In an average year (1850), Cornwall counted for 2.2% of the births recorded on FreeBMD, so 18.2% is a massive increase. I suspect that Wilmot as a female name (as it appears exclusively in St Ives) would give an even higher %, but FreeBMD doesn't differentiate between male and female records.

1109 Nannys were born in Cornwall, 28.4% of the Nannys born in Britain. Nancy and Annie also show considerable increases. Nans is a Cornish word that means 'valley', but I don't think there's a link between the names and the word. The Oxford English Dictionary first lists Nanny appearing with its nursemaid meaning at the end of the 18th century, nanny-goat appears in the mid 18th century.

Age Distribution
In my last post, I commented that there seemed to be a lot of 'older' names that were more popular amongst the workhouse women, probably because the age of the workhouse women tended to be older. In the past week, I've realised that I can depict the age distribution of the St Ives women, and compare whether different names have different age distributions. So to start, here is a graph:

Nearly half (411) of the women were under 20 years old (born after 1861), so 'young' names should dominate. From my Victorian Smiths posts, I've identified four names to test: Jane (which should be on 40+ year olds), Mary (should be on all ages, but mainly 20 year olds), Annie (which should be on 0 year olds) and Grace (which I didn't look at when I did my Victorian Smiths study - as you can see by its climb of 44 places, it's not that common among the general population).

I'm going to consider the names according to the percentage of each age group they represent, Jane is a good example of how this works.
Year born Frequency
1871-81 9
1861-70 4
1851-60 7
1841-50 3
1831-40 8
1821-30 7
1811-20 8
1801-10 2

The most number of Janes was born in 1871-81, but that only represents 4% of all women born 1871-81. The 8 Janes born 1811-20 represents 13% of all women. Graph:

There's a definite shift towards Janes on the older side.


Mary is fairly evenly distributed across the ages, although 30-40 year olds have the most Marys (over a quarter of them were named Mary), with 40-50 year olds and 0-10 year olds having less.


Annie is only borne by the young, most commonly those under 10.


Grace seems fairly evenly distributed among the ages, but skews a little older. I'm glad that these graphs seem to have correlated with my Victorian Smiths data. I'm going to make some more, and see if any surprises come up, which I will post.

Top 10

And as a small conclusion (and because I could post these graphs forever), the top 10. The top 10 seems to be becoming less representative of the names borne by the younger generations.