100 Baby Names That Dominated the 1970s By Joni Sweet, Stacker News AND Joseph Bien-Kahn, Stacker News On 3/4/21 at 8:00 PM EST Think about the last time you met a Pamela, a Shannon, or someone who introduced themselves as "Shad." Were they between 40 and 50 years old? That's no coincidence. While these names may have fallen out of the mainstream for newborns, they were some of the most popular names in the 1970s. You couldn't scroll through a homeroom attendance sheet at a school without coming across at least a few of these names. Names can tell the story of a generation. To learn more about the culture of the 1970s, Stacker took a look at data from the Social Security Administration Baby Names Database from 2019 to uncover the decade's top 50 names for boys and girls. Each name's current rank is also included to determine whether it's stayed trendy—or has gone the way of bell-bottoms.