census

Census Names Explorer lets you find when and where a name was popular, or unpopular, over the last one hundred years.

It really provides a number of possibilities, including trying to be a detective to identify the reasons for a name’s popularity during a specific era. For example, I discovered that my name, Larry, was extremely popular in the late 1940’s, and I wonder if it had anything to do with The Three Stooges back then? When I explored names like Jose, I found a huge increase over the past thirty years, likely connected to the overall Latino population numbers.

You can read more about it at Google Maps Mania.

I’m adding it to:

The Best Places For Students To Learn About…Their Names (which I recently updated)

The Best Tools For Analyzing Census Data