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Help[Facts] Nebraska names on Momaha.com
Well, the Omaha World Herald, the newspaper I write my column for, has a companion website called Momaha.com. They have just put up a feature that allows people to search how how a particular name was given in Nebraska over the last 20 years. They just used the raw data from the Nebraska state government, so every different spelling is treated as a separate name, and they don't attempt to correct what are probably gender coding errors. (The site will tell you there was a boy born in Nebraska named Sophia in 2009, which I think is more likely a mistake in typing in the gender code than reality.)
They only give a "top 25" listing for each year as list, but you can find the number and rank of any name for all 20 years by using the search function.
http://www.momaha.com/
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I hope you're right about young Master Sophia, but you might not be. I once knew a woman from a conservative Afrikaans family whose given names were Andries Gerhardus Philippus; it turned out that she had a grandfather with those names and it was "his turn" to hand them on to the next grandchild to be born, regardless of gender. Which is no doubt also why they weren't changed into something like Andrea (or Andriesa) Gerhardina Philippa,which would still be a heavy weight but at least not confusing.
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I think you are forgetting that because of sexism it is not that unusual for girls to get "boy's" names. If all the gender differences were in the male to female direction, I wouldn't necessarily think they were mistakes. But boys with "girl's" names are much, much rarer. It really is impossible for me to believe that a boy listed with a traditionally female name is "real" unless I have further evidence. :)
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