We spent a good deal of time thinking about what to name our little guy; even before we knew he was was a "he," we were making list of boy and girl names.  But nothing was juuuuust right enough.  So after countless hours of reading baby name books and discussions and lists online, we randomly stumbled upon the name Jackson.  It was the perfect balance of being not too popular and not too odd, and it blended well with our names and surname (speaking of surnames, we definitely had an affinity for them -- all of our boy and girl names, as well as both Jackson's first and middle name are surnames!).  We loved it from the start, and just like the perfect wedding dress or true love (barf, barf), we knew it was THE ONE! :) 

So the first thing I did was plug the name into The Baby Name Wizard NameVoyager, which displays naming statistics including ranking for many years prior.  It's neat to see the popularity of names across the years, but it also tells me which names to stay away from-- I didn't want anything too popular...I wanted to avoid having our little boy be one of many "name here"s among his peers. 

It takes a little while for the data to import for the previous year, so the 2007 data was just included recently.  I quickly looked to check Jackson -- hoping it hadn't suddenly shot up in popularity (in 2006 it was ranked #36 --- I wanted to stay below 30 if possible, since that's the size of a large class in school).  It only went up 3 spots in 2007 -- to rank # 33.  Yay!

It's such a neat tool -- I definitely recommend playing around with it!  It's fun to look at your own name, prospective baby names, etc.  For example, "Sharla" peaked in the 1970s ranking at 793, but has since dropped off to not even rank in the top 1000.  Props to my mom for giving me a really unique (but not weirdo) name! :)