Vol. 72 No. 2 (2024): NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics
Note

A Note on the UK Local BMD: A Full Name Onomastic Resource

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  • Stephen J. Bush
Stephen J. Bush
University of Oxford
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5195/names.2024.2543

Published 2024-06-06

Keywords

  • first name,
  • England,
  • Wales,
  • full name,
  • BMD

Copyright (c) 2024 Stephen J. Bush

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Data from the UK Local BMD, a volunteer project to transcribe the birth, marriage and death records of England and Wales, is a rare onomastic resource, being one of the few public datasets to contain full names. However, it has yet to be presented in a form amenable to large-scale analysis. This article processes 25,213,860 birth and 9,887,244 death records—collectively representing 204,427 names across 289 years–into a resource for community use. The data are presented alongside a number of summary statistics and both internal and external validation of its integrity. The data, along with the code used to generate it, are available at http://www.github.com/sjbush/uk_bmd for non-commercial research purposes.

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