Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
by watercast on Monday November 02, 2026 @08:08PM
(#50346668)
This sounded dubious to me, for Ashley in particular. In my genealogy research, it is a common name for men in the southern USA in the mid to late 19th century, and names used to be much more regionally bound. So I checked - I'm seeing about 60k Ashleys in the 1870 Tennessee census, out of 1.2 million people. That is about 5%, higher than Ashley ever got nationally as a girl name at its peak later. But over half of those are labeled female! 35k vs. 25k! Not sure about the data quality in my searches (I am not checking the familysearch transcriptions on tens of thousands of census record scans) but well, I was surprised so I thought I would share.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
by gregates on Monday November 02, 2026 @08:13PM
(#50346716)
It is certainly possible that Ashley was once a popular boy name. The point is that, contra the article, there is no evidence for this claim in the SSA data they have based their analysis on.
I think a lot of these cases would be hard to answer definitively just because we don't really have accurate data. And the fact that lots of people will repeat the claim "Ashley used to be a boys name" can be equally well explained by the fact that parents had to say something when their sons asked why they gave them a girl name, and they didn't have the data either.
Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
by watercast on Monday November 02, 2026 @08:59PM
(#50347025)
My "This" above was vague/ambiguous, sorry. Yes, I only meant, it seemed dubious to me that Ashley wasn't a predominantly boy name, in those times and places where it was actually common prior to the girl peak. (Which was not substantiated by the only data I checked of course.) Your actual substantive points make full sense, cheers.