John, Mary, William, Ann

 There are just shy of 1,600 names on my database of Charterhouse residents through the centuries.  Inevitably the bulk of them are from the 19th and 20th centuries, but there are many from earlier (and a few from later).  It was obvious that some Christian names cropped up far more than others, so I analysed the data.  The results were interesting.

I am not a statistician, and I acknowledge the limitations of this exercise.  For instance, lots of people have two Christian names, and I have used only the first of these.  Nonetheless, what emerges is sometimes surprising.

Many names crop up only once or twice.  It's clear that the people of Hull had no truck with celebrity culture.  There is not a single Victoria on the list, and only 5 Alberts.  Horatio Nelson didn't inspire any parents of our residents, and Florence Nightingale only 3.  Some people were given a name which is clearly a surname; it was common practice to use the maiden name of the mother or earlier ancestor as a Christian name for a child, and this probably accounts for the Morrison, Bellamy and 3 Smiths on our list.  The more exotic names, like Theophilus and Zadie May, may be the result of their parents' determination to be different.  Around the end of the 19th century fashions in baby names began to change, too late for many to appear on our list.  For instance, among the women there are none of the flower names which would become so popular.  As for the men, changes include the emergence of Stanley (4), Raymond (3) and Leslie (3).

Here are the top men's names.

This is not really surprising, even if it shows a lack of imagination in large numbers of parents.  John and William together make up 53% of the total in the top ten male names.  In 1903 the local paper commented on the fact that on the latest waiting list of 114 applicants for a room, 3 were called John Brown.

There's a similar pattern in the female list, but with some complications:

In addition to the 95 Marys there are 26 Mary Anns (which make the top ten in their own right) and 13 Mary Janes.  It was difficult to know whether to lump Ann, Anne and Annie together; but many an Annie had originally been baptised as Ann.  There is even less imagination here in the naming of girls than of boys, and the top 4 names make up 72% of the total in the top ten.

We can't extrapolate from this very limited data to the population as a whole.  Our residents generally came from the poorer class of society.  And perhaps Hull people named their children differently to other areas of the country.  It's interesting, nonetheless.