Name Researcher: Grandparents are no longer called Helga and Hans

Name Researcher
Grandparents are no longer called Helga and Hans

What are they actually called? grandparents Today’s babies and toddlers? Hardly any Helga, Ingrid, Horst and Hans, anyway. That’s the finding of North German name researcher Knud Bielefeld.

“The top names for the grandparents’ generation are Thomas and Sabine,” Bielefeld told the German Press Agency in Ahrensburg. Grandmothers are also called Susanna, Petra, Andrea and Claudia. When it comes to grandfathers, Michael, Andreas, Stefan and Frank are at the top. “Of course we still call the grandparents HelgaHans and his colleagues. But the grandchildren are often older.”

Grandparents aged 50 to 70

For his analysis, he examined a representative sample of all names from all generations since 1954, or about 410,000 data records. He categorized the grandparent generation as people born between 1954 and 1974 — people who are now between 50 and 70, the age range in which people typically become grandparents.

Names like Helga, Ursula, Ingrid and Gisela, as well as Hans, Klaus, Günther and Peter, were mainly given by people born before 1945 and are therefore the great-grandparents of today’s babies Toddler.

Middle names are sometimes named after great-grandparents.

“When I tell people around me who now have grandparents but don’t have grandchildren, they almost fall off their chairs because they don’t think they’re that old yet,” said Bielefeld also.

Bielefeld proposed an analysis of grandparents’ names to obtain middle name statistics. There are currently many names such as Elisabeth, Maria, Karl and Louis. “It is often assumed on social media that these babies are also named after their grandparents. But now we know: No, it is more likely a great-grandmother or great-grandfather.”

Knud Bielefeld’s Instagram account

Deutsche Presse-Agentur