The Social Security data is in, and the most-popular baby names in the state of Illinois are …

Noah and Olivia!

It’s interesting how names come into popularity and go out of vogue. But there are some that have staying power. For example, the name Alexander was tops in Illinois in 2009 for boys, while Isabella led the list for girls. As you can see in the chart below, Alexander is No. 3 for boys and Isabella is No. 5 for girls in 2015.

What’s amazing to the old guy who’s writing this article is that a lot of names that used to be considered “standards” aren’t even in the t0p 100 nowadays.

On the list of 2015 most-popular names, there’s no sign of Richard, Steven, Kenneth,  Donald, Jeffrey, Gregory, Edward, Scott or Brian — all names of my contemporaries. Yet there are two different spellings of Jaxon/Jaxson and Aiden/Ayden on the top 100 list of popular boys names this past year — and each of those variations are ahead of Mark, the seventh-most-popular name when I was born and not even in the top 100 this past year.

Mary, Susan, Linda, Patricia, Jane? They gone. But both Ariana and Arianna are in the top 100, as are both Zoe and Zoey — A to Z redundancies that weren’t on the radar in the mid part of the 20th century.

When our oldest daughter was born, the five most popular boys names in Illinois were Michael, Matthew, Daniel, Nicholas and Jacob. The top girls names were Jessica, Ashley, Emily, Samantha and Sarah. All five boys names made the list of top 100 in 2015, although further down, but Jessica and Ashley — the top two girls names back then — didn’t make the cut.

You can make your own decisions about what’s different than when you were a kid, and you can compare years easily on this page of the Social Security Office website.

The following table shows the 100 most frequent given names for male and female births in 2015 in Illinois. The number to the right of each name is the number of occurrences in the data. The source is a 100 percent sample based on Social Security card application data. See the limitations of this data source.

Top 100 Names in Illinois for Births in 2015