Women named JoAnne outside of Buffalo

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Head to the City of Good Neighbors, and it seems like one out of every ten women you meet is named JoAnne. It’s especially grating when you hear the name in a Buffalo accent - Jo-HEE-ayn. I’ve met few, if any JoAnnes in other cities where I’ve lived, but when I’m back home in Buffalo I encounter at least two a day, if not more.

Is the name common in the rest of the country, or is it just a Buffalo thing? Why is the name so popular among Buffalonians? Are there certain first names that are unusually common in your area, but rare elsewhere?

Unscientific proof: a Google image search for “Joanne Buffalo” results in 623 hits. for “Joanne Cleveland” – the Cleveland metro area being more than twice the size of the Buffalo area – there’s only 500 hits. “Joanne Detroit” results in 499 hits, “Joanne Chicago” 276 hits, and “Joanne Toronto” only 254 hits.

2

Well, my wife is a Joanne, we live in St. Louis but she is from Philly. Her parents were German, might there be a large portion of Germans in Buffalo?

3

What there might be - no, IS - a large proportion of in Buffalo is Catholics. And Joanne/JoAnne/Jo Anne/etc. is as second-generation-white-ethnic-Catholic a girl’s name as there is. German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, pick a name, there’ll be a Joanne for it. If she’d been born 20 years earlier she’d have been Joan, probably.

4

joanne milwaukee - 731
joanne “st louis” - 906
One St. Louis Joann (no e) was a cop killed on duty in 1991. Seeing her picture choked me up.

5

OMG!

joanne houston = 1,890,000 hits!

6

Yep. My 70 something Aunt is Joan.

My 50 something stepmother is Joanne.

My brothers ex-wife is a Joanne but she’s from Philadelphia not Buffalo.

I can’t say I know any 30ish Joannes. I say the name burned out.

7

I’m from Cleveland and I have two cousins and an aunt named Joanne. Please don’t capitalize the a in the middle.

Will you count Joann too, or only Joanne? How many spelling variants are there?

What about Joanna? It’s the original form of the name in Latin, used in the New Testament. From Greek Ιωαννα. I think Joanna sounds the nicest of all the variants. When people don’t notice the h in my name and pronounce it Joanna, I like it and I don’t correct them.

My name is an alternate form of Joanna developed in medieval Latin. The -h- was added probably in imitation of the masculine form Johannes, by scholars who knew the etymology. I just opened this thread to mention my cousins’ and aunt’s names. I don’t know if mine is considered a variant or a different name. I would say a variant because it’s my habit to always think of the etymology.

I don’t know why Joanne seems like an Italian-American phenomenon, considering Buffalo and all. Giovanna is not an unusually frequent name in Italy.