National Mary Day

The American record opens with the question already settled. Mary accounts for 91,668 girls in the Social Security Administration's data for its earliest recorded decade. The next name on that list, Anna, has 38,159.

It was not a passing fashion. Mary finished first in every one of the agency's decade tables from that first one through the 1950s. That is eight consecutive decades at the top of a list that reshuffles constantly underneath it.

What followed was not chaotic. Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, once forecast a year's total of new Marys by subtracting the recent average decline from the year before. He missed by 87 babies.

Cohen also went looking for Marys in newspaper birth announcements and kept finding them one generation up. On a single announcement page from Rock Hill, South Carolina, three families welcoming babies named Mazie, Ja'Nae and Asani each listed a grandmother named Mary.

National Mary Day sits at the end of that record. Every date above belongs to the name rather than to the observance. The day turned up on calendars quietly, and the calendars are the whole of its trace.