Welcome to my crack: This Web site has so many resources for baby names, it will make your eyes cross, including this awesome time-sucking graph that charts the increases and decreases in popularity of names from the 1880s until present-day.
Basically, you can look up any single name you want, or just do as we've been doing -- filter out one gender and then type in a letter of the alphabet and go down the list. This is how I learned that the name Zain is still kicking around, or that Zaid enjoyed its only burst of existence between 1990ish and 2003. Or that people stopped naming their sons "Orange" just before the turn of the century -- the LAST century -- and that the name Helen, for a BOY, didn't die out until just before the 1940s.
We're finding boy names to be VERY tricky. It's tough finding a middle ground between, like, the ten most popular names ever, and the ones that are super obscure to the point of sounding invented and/or labored. A lot of the stuff in between sounds either overly preppy, overly Chazzy (you know, popped-collar fraternity douche who likes to go out to LA clubs and get bottle service just to be seen, and uses the word "pussy" a lot), or like they'd be fantastic unisex monikers... for a girl. Since our last name is Mock, we're eliminating almost every name beginning with M, and we're having to be really careful about one-syllable names or nicknames because some of them sound too abrupt when you factor in the surname. Nicholas is a nice name, and so is Nick, but Nick Mock rhymes with tick-tock and sounds a bit staccato.
And then you get the names that either sound adorable for a little boy but not so hot on a man, or vice-versa. For instance, we each have/had a grandfather named William, and I think Billy is really cute. But I'm not wild about Bill or Will or William -- for instance, Will Mock just sounds like he's advertising a service, and William feels stiff and formal to me -- nor am I sure my son will want to be Billy until he's 60. Maybe he would. I can't really ask either of them, though.
All of which is to say: We are overthinking this, except on the flip side, I'm not sure that's possible. Because this is more or less permanent, barring any urges on our children's part to make like Kanye and change their names to Martin Louis (as in Vuitton) the King Jr., just to help see the country through a rough patch by letting it live vicariously through some serious crazy. I love Kanye now. Maybe we'll name them Kanye and Martin, in honor of both his identities.
That little digression exposes the real problem at work here, which is that it is IMPOSSIBLE to have serious name conversations. The fake ones are way too much fun. Recently they've been dubbed everything from "Clive and Remington" to "Darth and Lando" to "Melvis and Nermal," the latter coming from a baby book that actually has two lists called, respectively, "Unappealing Names" and "Geeky Names." And of course there's the fact that for years we've been referring to my future male children as Jacques Mock (who will be raised to think he's French, of course), Croque Mock (so that we can have a child named after a sandwich, the Croque Monsieur/Madame), and Broque Mock, which is just Brock but with the poncey suffix because we find the letter Q uncommonly funny.
In a way, anything we choose is going to be kind of a buzzkill after all this. Perhaps we'll just bow to capitalism and sell their names to corporations every couple years. Little Coca-Cola Mock and Bank of America Mock will be so very happy with their fat college funds.