Ella Rae, Mark Wahlberg and Rhea Durham out on 9/13 right before their third child was born. Credit: revolutionpix/Fame Pictures
For all the questionably creative celebrity baby names, there are plenty of celebrities who chose traditional, well-known names for their children. Mark Wahlberg had his third child with his fiance, model Rhea Durham, on September 16. Life and Style has the details of the baby’s name, and he’s simply named Brendan Joseph. Mark’s other two children are Ella Rae, 5, and Michael, two and a half.
According to the cool tool at the Baby Name Wizard, which tracks the most popular 1,000 names according to the US Social Security Administration, the name Brendan was most popular in the 1990s when it peaked at number 123 among popular boy’s names. Last year it was about the 200th most popular name.
Michael remained the most popular boy’s name from the 1960s until around 2000, when it dropped to number two. Ella has been in the top 50 most popular girl’s names for the last decade or so.
I also checked the popularity of a lot of the celebrity child names that are unique, but which might be common enough to fall on this graph, like Apple, Heaven, Brooklyn, Ireland, and Willow. Apple doesn’t fall on the chart, but Heaven, Brooklyn, Ireland, and Willow, which are all semi-decent names, don’t appear until after the 1990s and come up as huge spikes as the names increase in popularity. The name with the tiniest and spikiest spike is – can you guess – Shiloh.
Here’s the applet if you’d like to check some names. It just launches their website when you hit “go.” Here’s a FAQ describing how it works.
[I got some of the baby name ideas from this article in the Telegraph]
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