<p>It just occurred to me that the names my friends and I have are now dated – and I always thought that we were so hip! Women of my generation – but not our daughters – are called:</p>
<p>Jane
Barbara
Carol
Linda
Nancy
Mary
Sally
Helen</p>
<p>Our daughters are:</p>
<p>Alicia
Rebecca
Nicole
Danielle
Alexandra
Kelsey
Lauren
Kaitlin
Shannon</p>
<p>And so forth.</p>
<p>Observations? Did you know our own names are now out-of-date?</p>
<p>Absolutely. I work as a nurse in long term care. The residents have names like June, Gertrude, Frances, and a few slightly younger ones have Connie, Norma and the like. But Emily is rare. So is Anne but there are Muriels and Eleanors…when I worked as a public health nurse with pregnant and newly parenting teens, the popular names came right off of soap operas - Tiffany, Ashley etc. You can definitely see trends!</p>
<p>It’s even more noticeable in African American men and women (women especially). I’m just so thankful that my mom gave me an appropriate name. A lot of black women try to get too creative with these names and they end up ugly…I’m just glad my mom had some sense.</p>
<p>I work at a senior center where we have a large cohort of Shirleys. It was very popular back in the mid-1930s (because of Shirley Temple, of course).</p>
<p>I have a hard time with today’s spelling variations. Kaeleigh, Ashleigh, Makayla, etc.</p>
<p>My name was never trendy until I had my first DD. There were 7 girls in her class with my name. It has faded again. We gave her a rather unique name. It’s known but never available as a key chain, bike license plate or anywhere else.</p>
<p>My grandmothers’ names were Emily and Anna. Both of those names died out for a while, but they’re back in favor now.</p>
<p>I had hoped that the name my husband and I picked for our daughter would not instantly signal the decade in which she was born, but I’m afraid we didn’t succeed. According to the Baby Name Wizard, the popularity of her name, which I thought was a classic, dropped precipitously after the 1980s. Oh, well.</p>
<p>I had a Great Aunt Gertrude (horrific name) and a Grandmother Harriette. My sister got Harriette as a middle name! Thank God nobody got Gertrude.<br>
Are boys named Edward anymore?</p>
<p>VeryHappy: Your observation about names is so true! I do take exception to the name Mary. Mary, Anne, Elizabeth…those names are timeless. They seem to never go out of style.</p>
<p>I’ve always been a fan of names that I personally consider neither trendy nor old fashioned. In my opinion, that includes:</p>
<p>Mary
Anna
Emily
Susie
Janie
Samantha
Kimberly
Victoria
Elizabeth</p>
<p>For me, I know older people with these names, I have peers with these names, and there are kids I know with these names (but usually not 6 or 7 in every class!!!) I just think of these as names that never really go “out of style.”</p>
<p>For boys, I’d say:</p>
<p>James
Michael
Matthew
David
Andrew</p>
<p>Some people might think of them as boring, but I like them. Of course, it really is all personal opinion. Full disclosure: I really don’t care for trendy names at all, especially the ones that are not really gender specific (if either of my kids wants to name my grandchild something like Brooklyn or Carson, I’ll have a really hard time holding my tongue! And my apologies to all the parents of all the Brooklyns and Carsons out there!!! Just not my thing.)</p>
<p>How about names harvested from songs popular at the time of a baby’s birth? Like Michelle (thanks to P. McCartney) Sweet Caroline (Neil Diamond) Mandy (Barry Manilow)</p>
<p>Anyone have this experience? We genuinely thought we were giving our child a distinctive name. It’s an old classic name, but we liked it a lot and didn’t know anyone using that name now…then comes school and viola, there are four of them in the class. So much for original. I guess we were all influenced by something and thinking alike at the time. </p>
<p>My name is definitely of that ‘mother set’ listed at the outset. They were such original but trendy names back then which, I guess, didn’t stand the test of time.</p>
<p>I also see a lot of return of very old names again: like Sophia, Emma, Ava, Henry, Frank. </p>
<p>It’s interesting how they go in and out of style.</p>
<p>I was thinking I would not include Kimberley (or Samantha) in timeless names either. They seem trendy to me, maybe because I didn’t know any growing up. </p>
<p>My sister Kathleen had about 6 Kathy’s in her class. Being Irish, we called her Kate at home, but she was Kathy to everyone else. </p>
<p>Debbie is another I hear a lot in my generation. I would never have named my girls the names in the OP’s list for names of today, they were named for relatives born in the 1800’s, classic names to me. I do know several young Janes. I know a young Nancy and Helen too, maybe they are coming back.</p>
<p>After giving our first two kids very unusual names ( weird names said the grandparents) we gave the third one a more common name that was in the high 20s of popularity the year of his birth. It is now in the 400s. One D married a man with the same name and I now have a stepS with that name.</p>