Without endorsing its accuracy, this site may be of interest.
It shows a distribution map for the most common 50,000 surnames in the US, past and present (well, up to 1990). Godbye, Selting, and Barloe don’t feature at all, but here are the locations and ballpark numbers for Hoppe, Heiskell, Rowles and Trueblood.
Wow, that is a really cool site, thank you.
The first born sons in my line have been named Richard going back at least twelve generations. I do not plan to mess with tradition.
Dunno what that has to do with the topic at hand, but isn’t it cool?
hey, daria is a very popular name with slavic types. still going strong. i know quite a few.
it is interesting to see what names carry across the various ponds.
anders and erik still are popular amoung scans. there is a leif erikson thing in philly in october where the viking boat gets to sail around the schylkill river. when they introduce the boat men it is a very comic moment.
and sailing the boat today: erik, eric, erick, erik, erick, erik, bill, and eric. bill got the biggest laugh and applause.
sven-elvis is just scarry.
Whoa, Hoppe was only in Illinois, then they all moved to Iowa and Wisconsin, now they’re all over the place. Wow.
Regarding names that have come right back into fashion, I give you the totally ubiquitous Jack and Joshua.
Twenty years ago, maybe even 15 or less, I would have said that Jack was likely to be a grandad, and Joshua was his grandad - a Victorian industrialist with bushy sideburns. There was nobody called Jack or Joshua among my contemporaries at school.
Now, they are everywhere. The trend seems to have died off in the past couple of years as saturation point has been reached, but around 2000-2003, if I heard that someone had a baby boy, I could bet there was about a 50% chance they would name him Jack or Joshua.
My girlfriend teaches at a primary school and last year she had three Jacks, one Joshua and a plain Josh, out of 14 boys in her class.
As I said, the decline seems to have started as people recognise how common they have become. And in 70 years or so, expect Jack and Joshua to be deeply unfashionable old-man names.
I feel the same way about the name Susan. I have a 21-year-old co-worker named Susan, and I think she’s the only one I know under 40.