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How Common Was My Ancestor’s Name? Most Popular Baby Names By Decade

by Lisa Cooke | Mar 23, 2015

Edna Selby, about age 4. Taken about 1873.

Baby names are trendy things. Sure, there are a few standbys in every culture–like William and John in English–but popular baby names come and go. In fact, sometimes you can guess about how old someone is today based on their name (think Josh, Mildred or Shirley).

Popular Baby Names by Decade can help you decide whether your great-grandma Beulah or great-uncle Earl’s names were unusual for their time or a whim of the generation (Earl ranked 21st in 1890 and Beulah ranked 78th).

The site has lists of the most common names in the U.S. census back to the 1880s. You’ll also find a master list of THE most popular baby names during the last 100 years. No surprise: in the U.S., James, John, Robert, Michael and William top the boys’ to buy medication online charts. But I was a little surprised at the most popular women’s names. Click here to see what they are.

Was your ancestor an ethnic minority whose name may have only been popular in their neighborhood or where lots of other Irish, African-Americans or others lived? You can also search for the most popular names within a particular state.

Take a look and think about how your own family falls in. My parents weren’t following the crowd when they named me Sunny, that’s for sure. But my grandmother was a trendy gal: all 7 of her living children’s names hit the top 15 in the 1940s! And in Genealogy Gems Podcast episode 78 Lisa has talked about not only the popularity of her first name, but the soap opera star that made Lisa #1 in the early 1960s!

DNA Health Testing Back on U.S. Horizon for 23andMe

by | Mar 22, 2015

A direct-to-consumer genetic test, the first of its kind to be approved in the U.S., may become available through 23andMe, according to letters recently received by 23andMe customers. The FDA-approved test is designed to check to see if you are a carrier for Bloom Syndrome, a disease most common among those of Jewish heritage.

This is a huge step for 23andMe, which lost the ability to report health related information to its U.S. customers in November of 2013 and has been working to restore it ever since. Health testing for 23andMe customers is currently underway in Canada and the UK. This is the first big step toward restoring the health component of their testing to those of us in the U.S.

This kind of direct to consumer (DTC) testing is going to be a huge industry. For those of you with any experience getting a genetic test ordered and executed through your doctor’s office, you know this process can be lengthy, not to mention very expensive.

As more and more genetic tests are able to be offered directly to you via commercial companies, there will be more competition for this kind of test, meaning that there will be more research conducted into the cheapest way to produce this kind of test. Since these are the same kinds of procedures used for our genetic genealogy testing, more research and lower costs for DTC tests means cheaper genetic genealogy tests.

In further news, 23andMe announced their intention to enter the pharmaceutical industry and begin to develop medicines to address some of the diseases and conditions it has engineered genetic tests to identify. This is a good reminder that a company we have previously lumped with the other two purely genetic genealogy companies (Ancestry and Family Tree DNA) is very much a medically-minded company.

While 23andMe does provide information regarding your ancestral heritage and provides a list of genetic cousins, it is important to realize that this company’s interest in your family tree is focused more on your family’s ailments than its ancestors. (Click here to read a Forbes article about this development, and click here for more information about the laws that are in place to protect your genetic data, including health testing.)

Are you ready to get started with DNA testing for genealogy, or to get expert help in interpreting the tests you’ve already done? I can help! I’m “Your DNA Guide.” Consider starting with my series of genetic genealogy cheat sheets in the Genealogy Gems store:

Getting Started
Mitochondrial DNA
YDNA, Autosomal DNA
Using AncestryDNA
Using FamilyTreeDNA

And visit my website to learn more my consulting services.

Evernote for Android Gets a New Clean Look

by | Mar 21, 2015

Are you using Evernote for genealogy and an Android user? Then you’ll be interested the pretty substantial update that Evernote for Android just got!

Last year’s Evernote 6 for Android has been updated to meet Google’s new design specs for Android. A recent Evernote blog post explains these updates as reaching for the best of what Android has to offer now along with the unique look and function of Evernote.

According to the Evernote blog, the new look adds shadows, depth and subtle animations to guide the user experience. “The end result of this process is visually pared down,” they explain. “For example, we made the note editor as sparse as it’s ever been on Android. Evernote is your workspace, so we wanted to make it as clean and uncluttered as possible to minimize distractions to your writing.”

The collaborative features of Evernote–which I really love and talk about elsewhere on my website–also get a visual shout-out. “The note view now shows a picture of a colleague to communicate their presence in shared notes,” the product team explains. “This pairs with easy entry points into Work Chat to make the collaborative Evernote experience feel alive and dynamic.”

The team says that they listened a great deal to user feedback–in fact, that’s how they knew when to deviate from the Android norm. “Some aspects of Google’s suggestions weren’t appropriate for Evernote, and our users let us know that. The end result feels like an app experience unique to Evernote.” They also responded to user demand for a new note button that can be customized and reordered.

There’s a comment on the blog at how different the iOs and Android versions of Evernote are. This is absolutely intentional, they say! They want their apps “to feel like they were purpose built for the platform, on every platform.” Read more of their comments on the Evernote blog.

Resources

Evernote for Genealogy cheat sheets for Windows and for Mac. These quick-start guides will get you off and running!