BehindtheName.com – Follow Friday is a post about a website that provides insight into the first names in your family tree.

It offers a very flexible search interface for a database that ranks the popularity of given names for the past 100+ years. A host of countries, including the United States, Great Britain, Norway, Belgium, Hungary, Sweden, and Spain are included. It is important to note that this is a crowd-sourced site, i.e., users contribute the content and the accuracy depends on the resources of the person who submitted the information – just like an online tree.

This site is a lot of fun – even if your tree is littered with dozens of George and Mary and Anna and Lars given names like mine is.

Other sites that help with surnames:

Last Names Meanings Dictionary
Czech Surnames
American Name Society