How did Maggie Wren Stocco Roy’s name come about? As with Griffin, the root reason is that Sarah and I think it is a beautiful name. Wren, in particular, has no special meaning. We love it’s sound, but “Wren Roy” didn’t quite work. So Wren became her middle name. We wanted one of her names to have a connection to her ancestors, so we weighed that while considering possible first names.

My paternal grandmother was Margaret Crutchfield Roy, oldest in a large family (eight siblings survived childhood). She was born in 1902 near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and had little notion as a young girl that she would spend much of her life in China, including turbulent years during World War II and the Chinese Civil War. She and my grandfather married in 1928 and moved to China in 1930. They lived there, except for a few years of furlough, until they were expelled in 1951 after the communist revolution. Margaret died in 1992, not far from where she was born.

Although as far as I know Margaret never went by the nickname Maggie, we love the shorter form so our Maggie is simply Maggie, rather than Margaret. But we were thinking of grandma Margaret when we named her, and trust that Maggie will adapt to the adventures and adversities of life with as much grace as her namesake.

As with Griffin’s name, we did a bit of research to see how popular the names “Maggie” and “Margaret” have been. Like any father, I plugged the info into a spreadsheet and graphed it. The graph below includes data for Maggie, Margaret, and Griffin (for comparison). The source of the data is the Social Security Administration.

Popularity rank zero (or one, really) at the top of the chart would be the most popular name for that year. Thus, “Margaret” was very popular (top ten) until 1950 when it started slowly descending in popularity. When I first researched “Griffin” in 2009, I didn’t push the search back to 1880 so I didn’t know the name had scattered appearances before 1910. Then it faded to obscurity until the 1980s.

The name “Maggie” follows an interesting trajectory. Quite popular at the turn of the century but then descending steadily until a sudden resurgence from 1970-1990. The early popularity might be partly explained by steady immigration from Ireland at the time. (The biggest surge in Irish immigrants was after the potato famine in the 1850s, but it remained relatively high until the end of the century.)

Immigration can’t explain the 1970s surge. We’re open to hypotheses. Some explanations we’ve bounced around include Rod Stewart’s 1971 hit, “Maggie May” (or less plausibly, songs by the Beatles and the Doors in 1970) or Maggie Smith’s acting career (she won her first Oscar in 1969). The name’s popularity stabilized in the ’90s and has hovered around the 200 mark for the past decade.

In reality, of course, none of this data (or our pop-cultural musings) had any real impact on our naming decision. We had chosen Maggie as our top girl name before Griffin was born, before doing any research. We’re thrilled that little Maggie is here to inhabit the name (which fits her perfectly). We’ve had fun already with various unexpected nicknames that pop up: Magpie is my favorite, though I also like to call her Mag-nificent. Because she is. And we hope she knows it.