Sunday, 4 November 2018

Armistice Babies

A blog post from the (UK) National Archives by Jessamy Carlson takes a look at some of the names occurring in birth records for England and Wales. Some of the first names that became more popular from 11 November 1918 were Victor, Victoria, Peace, Irene (derived from the Greek work for peace), Versailles, Poppy and Armistice. None of these challenged John and Mary but did see an increase.

Did the same thing happen in Canada? Privacy restrictions means provincial birth registrations for the period are not yet public. The 1921 census is. The table shows the occurrence of the names, first or middle, for the specified birth year from that census. Except for the name Poppy there is a similar trend to that in England and Wales.


Looking beyond the names mentioned by TNA to those of military leaders, both Haig and Currie had maximum occurrence for births in 1919 in the Canadian census.
The name Kitchener was popular in Canada from 1915 to 1917 but faded following the death of Field Marshal Kitchener in June 1916. In England and Wales there were 74 Kitcheners in 1915, 54 in 1916, 13 in 1917, then no more until 1921.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I knew someone named 'Victory' who was born on 11 Nov 1918. He was incorrectly indexed as 'Victoria' in the 1921 census, so he probably was included in your count.