I don't know where all the time has gone, it's over 5 years since I last blogged so I hope I remember how to do it. First I need to add a picture I think, it makes blogs more interesting if you have a picture. Okay that's fine, it is a rather big one but the subject of my blog today.
Where have all the Sheilas gone?
I have noticed over the years that not many young girls are called Sheila any more. I knew a few when I was a child and recently, on face-book, I have met a few while playing online games. In fact I have collected quite a few as online friends and must say that they are a lovely group of friends. The above photo shows many of them. This makes me think it must have been quite a popular name in the post World War 2 era. Time for a bit of research to keep me busy, better than housework.
Over the past 20 years or more I have researched my family history so while I have hit a bit of a hiatus in that research I moved on to this. The place I decided was a good place to start is the births, marriages and deaths site FreeBMD. This has records of births in the UK from 1837.
I started in 1837 searching for all the children registered with the name Sheila which also includes the different spellings of the name. The first record I found was in the September quarter of 1861. This doesn't mean there were none before her but to find those would mean searching the parish registers which aren't a full record and were only filled in if the child was baptised and many of the records have been lost over the years.
I got waylaid in my research here because the first record I found turned out not to be a Sheila after all. Someone must have transcribed it wrong from the original record and as usual I went off at a tangent looking into the name it should have been which was Thulia. But that upset me because Thulia died in their month of birth and I put their because the record said gender unknown.
The next names in the birth record are not until March quarter of 1877 and there were 2 babies given the name in the birth records but on researching them there are more transcription errors. Sheila Louise Hill was Theilia according to the 1881 census and Sheila William Lathbury was Charles William when I checked the original record. This make me wonder how many of the records I have found in the past are wrongly transcribed.
The next Sheilas are in the 1870s and there are 5 between 1877 and 1880. I'm not going to investigate whether they are really Sheilas as I might be here forever. Between 1881 and 1890 there were 27 Sheilas listed and from then on the number went up dramatically. In the 1920s there were 30,844 and even more dramatic rises in the 1930s and 1940s with more than 50,000 in each of these two decades (including me!). This is when the name Sheila piqued in popularity. By the 1950s there was a big drop to 29,272 and the 1960s it was down to 8,746.
This trend continued towards the end of the century and the name is now on the list of girls names that are at risk of disappearing all together. Not sure how true this is but this is the list I found:
Annette, Beryl, Brenda, Carolyn, Cheryl, Dawn, Debbie, Debra, Denise, Diane, Donna, Doris, Edna, Freda, Geraldine, Gladys, Gwendoline, Hilda, Janet, Janice, Jean, Jordan, Kirsty, Lindsey, Lorraine, Lynda, Lynn, Marian, Marion, Marjorie, Marlene, Maud, Mildred, Norma, Pamela, Pauline, Sheila, Shirley, Suzanne, Thelma, Tracey, Tracy, Toni and Yvonne.
As the tradition of naming children after their parents seems to have ended all these Sheilas have obviously not named the children after themselves, maybe the name wasn't so popular with those who were named Sheila.
The name Sheila is thought to be derived from the Irish name Sile which is believed to be from the Gaelic form of the Latin name Cecilia. Cecilia is the patron saint of music. Different meaning I have found for the name are heavenly, musical and blind one.
