In our first book on baby names Beyond Jennifer & Jason, we created something called The Hundred Year Rule, which holds that it takes a full century for a name to shake off its dusty image and sound fresh again.
When we look at the popularity lists for a hundred years ago — 1925 — we see any number of vintage baby names that have already popped back, names like Violet, Sadie, Ruby, Isabel, Max, Oliver and Felix.
The question is, are there any names from a century ago that we’ve overlooked and are still worthy of re-evaluation? Here are some you might consider from the popularity list of 1925 — although we do have to keep in mind that the US population then was about 30% of what it is now, so some of these names were attached to a very small number of babies.
Adelia
Agnes
Aili
Albertine
Amalia
Antonia
Ara
Avis
Bernadine
Bethel
Betty
Celestine
Coletta
Cordelia
Delphine
Delta
Dorothea
Easter
Erie
Florrie
Abner
Albert
Alfred
Ambrose
Archibald
Augustine
Basil
Benedict
Calvin
Casper
Chester
Claude
Clement
Cleve
Clyde
Dorsey
Edwin
Ernest
Floyd
Frank
Linda Rosenkrantz
Linda Rosenkrantz is the co-founder of Nameberry, and co-author with Pamela Redmond of the ten baby naming books acknowledged to have revolutionized American baby naming. You can follow her personally at Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. She is also the author of the highly acclaimed New York Review Books Classics novel Talk and a number of other books.
