How old is someone named Gertrude? SSA data says 80

In 2014 FiveThirtyEight published "How to Tell Someone's Age When All You Know Is Her Name," using SSA birth records and actuarial tables. The piece went everywhere, then went stale; FiveThirtyEight is gone.

I rebuilt the method on current data: SSA name counts by birth year (1880-2025) multiplied by the SSA's 2026 cohort life tables gives the expected number of living Americans with each name and their age distribution. Median and quartiles per name, all 17k names, updated when each new data release lands.

Fun findings: a Mabel today is either a toddler or a great-grandmother (median 13, middle half runs 5 to 70). Brittany's median is 35, right on schedule from the 1980s boom. Only about 8% of Gertrudes ever born are still with us.

Honest limitations: US-registered births only (immigrants with the name aren't counted), names under 5 births/year are suppressed by the SSA, and it assumes people with a given name die at the national average rate for their sex and cohort.

Everything is static HTML + client-side JS on Cloudflare Pages, computed by a Bun/SQLite pipeline. The full per-name dataset is a free CC0 CSV on the site. Happy to answer anything about the method or the stack.