Decade hub · representative classroom
The 1884 classroom
What did an average American classroom sound like in 1884? Apportion 30 seats across the names actually recorded that year — 16 girls and 14 boys, matching the real 1884 birth distribution — and every one of the 30 seats carries a different name — no name was common enough in 1884 to guarantee a duplicate in a class of 30.
A statistical reconstruction of an average classroom, not an actual class record.
The roster
- Class size
- 30
- Girls / boys
- 16 / 14
- Unique names
- 30
- Repeated seats
- 0
- Most repeated name
- Alice ×1
- Top-name share
- 3.3%of the 30 seats
Every seat carries a different name — no name was common enough in 1884 to guarantee a duplicate in a class of 30.
Seat counts by name
| Name | Sex | Seats |
|---|---|---|
| Alice | F | 1 |
| Anna | F | 1 |
| Annie | F | 1 |
| Arthur | M | 1 |
| Bertha | F | 1 |
| Bessie | F | 1 |
| Charles | M | 1 |
| Clara | F | 1 |
| Edward | M | 1 |
| Elizabeth | F | 1 |
| Emma | F | 1 |
| Florence | F | 1 |
| Frank | M | 1 |
| George | M | 1 |
| Grace | F | 1 |
| Harry | M | 1 |
| Henry | M | 1 |
| Ida | F | 1 |
| James | M | 1 |
| John | M | 1 |
| Joseph | M | 1 |
| Margaret | F | 1 |
| Martha | F | 1 |
| Mary | F | 1 |
| Minnie | F | 1 |
| Robert | M | 1 |
| Sarah | F | 1 |
| Thomas | M | 1 |
| Walter | M | 1 |
| William | M | 1 |
How the roster is generated
The reconstruction is deterministic: the same 1884 records always produce the same 30 students. Seats are apportioned, not drawn at random.
- The 30 seats are split by sex using the actual 1884 national totals:
femaleSeats = round(30 × F_total / (F_total + M_total)), with the remainder going to boys. For 1884 that yields 16 girls and 14 boys. - Within each sex, every name recorded in 1884 gets an expected seat count:
expected_seats = name_count / sex_total × sexSeats. - Each name receives the whole-number floor of its expectation; the remaining seats go to the names with the largest fractional remainders. Ties break toward the higher recorded count, then alphabetically.
- Names may repeat — repetition is the point of the reconstruction, and no uniqueness is enforced.
Every name on the roster was recorded for at least one 1884 birth of the matching sex. Full methodology · Back to the 1880s hub
- Data coverage
- Decade 1880–1889; lifetime data through 2025
- Completeness
- Complete decade
- Methodology version
decade-hub/v1.0.0- Source version
ssa-national-2025- Generated
- 2026-08-14T03:32:54.323Z