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ArchivesRe: Q about Social Security data
in reply to a message by ClaudiaS
I have noticed this also. The name this is the most striking with to me is "Joe". There are a great many more boys listed as just "Joe" in the early years of SSA than I think could possibly have actually had that form on their birth certificates.
The further back you go in the Social Security data, the more seeming gender mistakes there are (too many boys listed with names like Mary).
And I think there are also more mistakes in year of birth. "Lindbergh" first shows up as having more than five boys born with that name a couple of years BEFORE Charles Lindbergh became famous. This is hardly likely and probably comes from elderly and fairly uneducated people simply not remembering their own age correctly when they filled out SSA forms.
The further back you go in the Social Security data, the more seeming gender mistakes there are (too many boys listed with names like Mary).
And I think there are also more mistakes in year of birth. "Lindbergh" first shows up as having more than five boys born with that name a couple of years BEFORE Charles Lindbergh became famous. This is hardly likely and probably comes from elderly and fairly uneducated people simply not remembering their own age correctly when they filled out SSA forms.
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The first year I find any children listed as "Baby" is 1968, so I would assume that most applications prior to 1968 were not made at birth. However, "Unknown" appears every year and reached a peak in the 1950s when five or six hundred girls and a roughly equal number of boys every year are listed as Unknown. Any ideas on why so many people would have a first name missing, when it's not that their parents hadn't yet decided on a name? Perhaps they put only a first initial, which wasn't accepted by the SSA, so "Unknown" was substituted?
This message was edited 1/10/2011, 3:04 PM
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Social Security numbers were not routinely assigned at birth until the mid/late 1980s.
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