Ever wondered about the most popular baby names of the 1930s?

✯ Day 72 of Vintage 365 ✯

{Immensely beautiful photo from 1932 of a young mother and her darling little baby. I wonder what 1930s name this adorable tyke was given? Photo via Julie Wilson World on Flickr.}

Names fascinate me. As a child I poured over my mother's spiral bound baby name book until the pages were quite literally falling out (sorry, mom!). I adored that book, with it's soft pink, light blue and crisp white cover that foretold of the fascinating information related to bestowing a name on one's child that it contained within. I read through each name and its original and meaning, soaking up that information with gusto, feeling all the while that perhaps one day it would serve me well.

Indeed, it has. While I haven't had the honour of naming any children of my own yet, I've been grateful many times for the diverse array of information I extracted from that tome of monikers, and even now many years later I'm still intrigued by the diverse array of names that people have bestowed upon their children over the centuries.

Perhaps one of the most interesting elements behind baby names is how particular ones become fades, whereas others are as timeless as the grass is green. My own first name, Jessica, was amongst the most popular of the 1980s (when I was born) and early 90s, yet just a couple of decades earlier it was a relatively uncommon name (not rare, but far from the days of my youth when it seemed there were at least three Jessicas in every elementary school classroom).

Just as certain of-the-moment names are highly popular now in the 2010s (think Jaxon, Mason, Jackson, Riley, Addison, Peyton, McKenzie, Rhys/Reese, Chloe, and Kennedy - to list but a few), so to have various names been widely bestowed upon newborns throughout the years.

In the 1930s, the decade in which my maternal grandma (Bernice) was born, according to the US Social Security Agency, names like Donald, Raymond, Charles, and Thomas were popular for little boys, whereas moms were keen to dub their daughters Betty, Shirley, Dorothy, and Barbara. Other common (but slightly less popular) 1930s baby name options for girls included Mildred, June, Rita, Delores, Gladys, Loretta, Ethel, and Gertrude.

If the topic of names is something that interest you, too, than you may enjoy checking out the lists of top 200 baby names (for both males and females) that the SSA has online for every decade between the 1880s and the 2000s.

These lists provide a fascinating snapshot of what names have come and gone, remained popular and (in some instances) nearly vanished  from use completely over the past several decades.

They're perfect for anyone who has a child, pet, fictional character, beloved car, or other being or item that needs a wonderful name that draws inspiration from a certain point in time - and were they compiled into a book when I was a child, chances are I'd have read them until they were falling apart at the seams, too.