The country is plunged into the Great Depression and, at its height, 13,000,000 are unemployed. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected to the Presidency. Everyone is singing I'm Popeye The Sailer Man and watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Little Women, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. Benny Goodman's big band boogie-woogie ignited the swing craze among teenagers. The War of the Worlds terrifies a nation.
Read on to see what people were naming their babies in the 1930s.
Boys
- Robert
- James
- John
- William
- Richard
- Charles
- Donald
- George
- Thomas
- Joseph
- David
- Edward
- Ronald
- Paul
- Kenneth
- Frank
- Raymond
- Jack
- Harold
- Billy
- Gerald
- Walter
- Jerry
- Joe
- Eugene
Girls
- Mary
- Betty
- Barbara
- Shirley
- Patricia
- Dorothy
- Joan
- Margaret
- Nancy
- Helen
- Carol
- Joyce
- Doris
- Ruth
- Virginia
- Marilyn
- Elizabeth
- Jean
- Frances
- Beverly
- Lois
- Alice
- Donna
- Martha
- Dolores
All names are from Social Security card applications for births that occurred in the United States at the end of February 1940. The most popular names of the 1930s were taken from a universe that includes 10,842,022 male births and 11,041,919 female births.