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Re: Usage of Sabrina
Confused! (I know nothing about the topic, or much about US censuses: just trying to understand out what you wrote.) The numbers 1544 and 1644 in your message are confusing: two random numbers agreeing in the last two digits is near 1%: and since you said Sabrina was very rare, ... I am suspecting I am misreading that sentence.
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Yup, it is a coincidence, but that is what the numbers are: there are exactly 100 more women listed in the index to the 1850 census on Ancestry.com named Sabina than there are women named Sabrina. It's not a mistake, just a random fact. :)That makes both Sabina and Sabrina rare. There are 2,088 women named Wealthy; 19,907 named Almira; and 1,343,878 named Mary in the indexes to the 1850 census.
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Thanks, I understand ... such 1% occurrences do happen if you quote numbers often, well, about once every hundred times :-) That was a side issue.What had confused me primarily was that you probably meant that two rare names Sabina and Sabrina were being confused, where as I misread the pragmatics of your sentence and concluded that you meant that the rare name Sabrina was being confused with a more common name Sabina. That was confusing, because, if any significant number (say more than 50) of the 1644 people listed as Sabina's were actually Sabrina's (and none confused the other way), then Sabrina was more common than Sabina!
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