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Early 20th Century Names Replacement

SCREENSHOTS
6,748 Downloads 371 Thanks  Thanks 89 Favourited 65,205 Views
Uploaded: 16th Dec 2011 at 2:09 AM
In the midst of overhauling my Downloads folder to isolate all my vintage CC and pondering default replacements, I got the urge to put together my own NPC and townie name replacement for the period 'hood I will someday get a chance to complete.

All of the first names are drawn from the Social Security Administration's Popular Baby Names site. There are about 350 (give or take a few) for each gender. I mostly stuck to within the most popular 200 names, culled from random years ranging from 1900 to 1960. After all, in the 1940s (for example), you had lots of people walking around that had been born at the turn of the century and of course a whole lot more being born right then. There's classic names (John, William, Mary, Elizabeth) to the dated (Hiram, Hortense) to the kinda strange (Dixine, the male name of Jewell). Some sound more obviously late Victorian (Adelaide, Aldous, Thaddeus) while others are more solidly '50s (Barbara, Carl). Some names are technically duplicated in alternate forms, like Philip/Phillip, Robert/Bob, Francis/Frank/Frankie, because hey, some people are more formal than others. I also repeated the top 5 most common names a few times to reflect that...well...they were really common. Seriously, for decades those most common names stayed planted in their ranks.

A sample of female first names available:


A sample of male first names:


Last names, being a little more timeless, include all the most common surnames in the U.S. and whatever others I decided to throw in-- many were plucked from various WW2 books I have lying around. If you're familiar with either the book or the miniseries Band of Brothers, you may find yourself recognizing a bunch of those fellows' names if/when they pop up. (Ditto Mad Men.) There are only ~290 last names, which are unisex.

A sample of surnames:


If you reeeeally want to see all/most of the names, I've uploaded 3 Word docs in a .rar file here. They still have some color-coding implying where in the name ranks they came from (blue and purple are top 200; black is everything else). All the name types ('American' and foreign) are together within each.

You, too, could have your game spawn a Betty White townie!


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The difference between the 2 files:
The "All-American" version sticks to names that are relatively culturally neutral for both first and last names. These are all the bland Johns, Marys, Smiths, and Joneses (and so forth).
  • Choose this one if: You don't want any chance of having an EAxian mash-up name. It bugs me to pretend a "Schwartz" or "Garcia" is less American than a "Smith," but this is the best way to avoid bad combos. For this period and within the confines of the game, it's more plausible for various immigrant nationalities and ethnicities to choose an American/English-sounding name and/or have the immigration authorities butcher their surnames into something more American than vice versa. Obviously there were/are lots of non-traditional names in use at the time, still, but this way you can take charge of creating them yourself and more accurately.

The International version does include names, first and last, that are really, really blatantly German/Italian/Spanish/Japanese/Eastern European/etc.
  • Choose this one if: You don't really care how the names might get jumbled up with each other or with wrong phenotypes, or you can easily pretend there's lots of cultural appropriation and intermarriage going on if you ever get, e.g., an Asian Sim named Hershel O'Neil. The list of names is still heavily weighted towards American and Western European names, but there's noticeably more variety than in the other version. (I actually did this one first and then removed the most obvious names to create the "All-American" one.)

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Standard installation rules apply: you can only have 1 name replacement mod in at a time. For best results, leave the file titled Live.package. (Personally, I keep mine in its own labeled subfolder in a Default Replacements main folder to keep track of what type it is.) This does not alter the names of pre-existing townies and NPCs, only newly-spawned ones. Works best with a brand new neighborhood built off cleaned and emptied templates. There's a nice tutorial on getting to that point and then repopulating here.

Additional Credits:
Much thanks to Jordi for the first name mod, allowing people to edit it, and also basically giving an impromptu tutorial in the comments of that post.
SimPE, of course.