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Recently the UK Office of National Statistics released the 2017 baby names, having a niece born last year this was of great interest to me so I know the dataset

Recently the UK Office of National Statistics released the 2017 baby names, having a niece born last year this was of great interest to me so I know the dataset quite well. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/datasets/babynamesenglandandwalesbabynamesstatisticsgirls https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... So that is 43 Heathers born last year in the UK. Not very many, however, compare that to the 106 Margarets born last year. Margaret is an unpopular name, however, Margaret was all the rage a century ago, Prime Ministers and Royal Family members are testament to that. But nowadays the name has gone the way of 'Adolf' (of which zero were brought into the world in the UK last year). What I find most interesting about names in the UK is when you have to identify yourself in hospital, with the police or anywhere else where they have access to the 'full database'. Even if you have an extremely common first name then the authorities only need to know your surname and your date of birth to have a pretty good idea who you are and what your National Insurance number is. Add the town or hospital of your birth and they have an exact match. Unless your name really is 'John Smith' and you give your birth town as 'London' there is no chance that the police will be getting you confused with anyone and even then the other 'John Smith' characters can probably be eliminated from enquiries very easily. The police, secret services and others needing to go undercover go to extraordinary lengths to get the birth certificates and other particulars of 'dead babies' that died a long time ago without distressing anyone except their mothers. You wonder why they do this rather than just make up any old name. Surely they could ask the passport people to just make up an appropriate passport and get the DVLA (drivers licence people) to do likewise? Well no, the statistics are quite hard to fiddle, you wouldn't be able to just fake a 'Heather' or even a 'John' as people really are not as anonymous as you might think.

nindalf 8y ago
In the book The Day of the Jackal, this is covered well. The assassin goes to a cemetery, looks for gravestones of infants who would have been the same age as him and finagles that child’s birth certificate using info from a local vicar. With that, he’s able to get all the other documents, including a passport. And then he’s off to assassinate people.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  I'd be careful about using a movie as a how-to guide for anything other than making a movie. They routinely make up any sort of nonsense needed to make the plot move forward. This is quite obvious when the topic is something I know more about than a lay person. For example, in the Revenant, the hero goes swimming for extended periods in an ice-filled river. TDotJ was a good movie, though :-)
  - philwelch 8y ago
    There’s also a sense of ethics involved in portraying criminal hijinks, because you don’t always want to advertise how to commit difficult crimes. For example, most of the meth production techniques in Breaking Bad were utterly fictitious.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    I’ve never seen the movie but I read the book a long time ago. The description in TDOTJ of how to get a legitimate passport with false information is almost exactly the same as what the the police spies did for infiltrating political activist groups in the UK. I wouldn’t try it in the UK now though. Death and birth cert records are now collated at a national level. That’s not true in the US so it’s still possible. The record keeping procedures vary by state. Some states do it centrally, some are stored at the county level. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
    - VLM 8y ago
      Social Security Death Index is nationwide in the US and seemingly instantaneous, certainly no more than a day or two to update. Although half your argument is invalid, the other half remains perfectly valid, along with the overall conclusions, etc. SSDI is pretty useful for recent (dead in the last century or so) genealogical research.
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      How about someone who died abroad, how would that get recorded in the UK, say you die in Papua New Guinea (not a particularly strong civic administration system AFAIK)? ...
deleted 8y ago
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Theodores 8y ago
Here is a good read on how the snitches do it properly, in this case the Metropolitan Police 'Special Branch': https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/29/undercover-secret-police-lewis-evans-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/29/undercover-sec... Here the story is about going undercover in the former anti-globalisation movement. Regarding the name 'Margaret', for me it is a bell-weather of name popularity, a reference point for other names to be compared by.

nindalf 8y ago

In the book The Day of the Jackal, this is covered well. The assassin goes to a cemetery, looks for gravestones of infants who would have been the same age as him and finagles that child’s birth certificate using info from a local vicar. With that, he’s able to get all the other documents, including a passport. And then he’s off to assassinate people.

WalterBright 8y ago
I'd be careful about using a movie as a how-to guide for anything other than making a movie. They routinely make up any sort of nonsense needed to make the plot move forward. This is quite obvious when the topic is something I know more about than a lay person. For example, in the Revenant, the hero goes swimming for extended periods in an ice-filled river. TDotJ was a good movie, though :-)
- philwelch 8y ago
  There’s also a sense of ethics involved in portraying criminal hijinks, because you don’t always want to advertise how to commit difficult crimes. For example, most of the meth production techniques in Breaking Bad were utterly fictitious.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  I’ve never seen the movie but I read the book a long time ago. The description in TDOTJ of how to get a legitimate passport with false information is almost exactly the same as what the the police spies did for infiltrating political activist groups in the UK. I wouldn’t try it in the UK now though. Death and birth cert records are now collated at a national level. That’s not true in the US so it’s still possible. The record keeping procedures vary by state. Some states do it centrally, some are stored at the county level. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
  - VLM 8y ago
    Social Security Death Index is nationwide in the US and seemingly instantaneous, certainly no more than a day or two to update. Although half your argument is invalid, the other half remains perfectly valid, along with the overall conclusions, etc. SSDI is pretty useful for recent (dead in the last century or so) genealogical research.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    How about someone who died abroad, how would that get recorded in the UK, say you die in Papua New Guinea (not a particularly strong civic administration system AFAIK)? ...

deleted 8y ago

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Theodores 8y ago

Here is a good read on how the snitches do it properly, in this case the Metropolitan Police 'Special Branch': https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/29/undercover-secret-police-lewis-evans-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/29/undercover-sec... Here the story is about going undercover in the former anti-globalisation movement. Regarding the name 'Margaret', for me it is a bell-weather of name popularity, a reference point for other names to be compared by.