A Little Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Baby Name Wizard

Once again accepting Randy Seaver's challenge for Saturday night, I'm checking out my name, and others at Baby Name Wizard. It's always fun for me to try new things and share them, and I'm glad when it works out that I can participate.

These were the challenges:

1)  Go to the Baby Name Wizard site and see how popular your name was over the 20th century, and how popular a baby name it is today.  Check out your spouse, your children and your grandchildren (if you have some!) also. 

2)  What does your name mean (find out on http://www.babynamewizard.com/baby-name)?

3)  Tell us about it, and show us your graphs, in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, in a Facbook status or a Google+ Stream post.  

Here are my results:

1) I did two spellings of my name, both Joleen and Jolene (which enjoyed more popularity). Here is the graph, also including the name Jolette.

You can see that my spelling had its peak in the 1950s, when it ranked #880. You can probably guess I haven't met many during my lifetime who share this spelling. It's interesting that Jolene was much more widely used, and enjoyed a brief comeback in 2009-2010. 

My husband's name is Robert. His name peaked in popularity in the 1930s. He, however, was born in 1953 when his name was still very popular, ranking at #3. It still ranks #61. The graph includes the names Robin and Roberto.

 

We have nine children and lots (I mean LOTS) of grandchildren, so I'm not going to try to enumerate all of their names here with their ranking results. I love looking their names up, though.

2) Apparently, according to this particular site, Joleen has no meaning or origin. I think that gives me the liberty to be anything I wish! My mom told me she named me after the young woman who was the girls' club president at her high school. She thought she was a very kind person, so I've always felt some desire to live up to that reputation. ;)  (According to another site, Joleen is a form of Jolene which appears to be the name Jo or Joe with the feminine -lene suffix attached.)

Origin of the name Robert:Introduced to England by the Normans, Robert is derived from the Old High German Hruodperht, a compound name composed of the elements hruod (fame) and perht (bright). The name was borne by Robert I (d. 1035), duke of Normandy and father of William the Conqueror, and by three kings of Scotland.

3) Done!

Thanks, Randy! I enjoy these challenges, and reading others' results, as well.

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