[OC] Als in den USA lebender Brite war ich schon immer neugierig, wie Amerikaner ihren Kindern die gleichen Namen geben wie einige britische Grafschaften (viele Kents und Devons), andere jedoch nicht (kein Baby Middlesex oder Leicestershire). Also habe ich alle 145 Jahre der Babynamendaten der Sozialversicherungsbehörde kartiert!
Von Stargrazer82301
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May is when the Social Security Administration releases the baby name data for the previous year, so now seemed to time to delve into this. I compared baby names for the [entire time span they provide](https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/baby-names-from-social-security-card-applications-national-data) (1880 to 1025) to *Historical* (pre-1844) county borders, as defined by the [Historical Counties Project](https://www.county-borders.co.uk/), and mapped it all up using the [GeoPandas](https://geopandas.org/en/stable/docs/user_guide/mapping.html) library.
Counties whose name ends in „shire“ that are only used as baby names without the „shire“ (eg baby Lincoln vs Lincolnshire) get only an honourable mention, and are indicated in grey. Durham vs County Durham got full credit, though.
Thoughts and prayers to every little baby Berk and Hamp.
Good one! I also think its interesting how those names ended up diverging along racial lines (Tyrone is an especially prominent example).
In the U.S., I would think the given name “Devon” is a variant of “Devin,” which comes from Irish Gaelic and is etymologically unrelated to Devonshire
Everyone please meet my new baby boy Leicestershire. His older sister Aberdeemshire is very excited to welcome him into the world.
„Lester“ is a name though. Did you check for phonetic spelling variants in cases like that?
The reason for „Lincoln“ is obvious of course.