I believe that it's rather common for there to be errors in the data processing where the sex was incorrectly entered. In 1989,
Jennifer is listed as the 821 boys name, I remember reading that was an error.
According to the BabynameWizard.com FAQ
Girls named
George? Boys named
Christ? Whoa!
The data, especially from the earliest years of the sample, reflect some artifacts of the data entry process. A century ago, names like
George,
William and
Christopher were routinely written as abbreviations (Geo, Wm,
Christ). Coding errors, where the wrong sex was marked on a form, were also more likely to slip through back then. If a name was extremely common, these errors and abbreviations could end up among the 1000 top listings. Eliminating these names would introduce new errors and biases into the data, so they've been included as reported in the original SSA figures. But no, I don't believe there really were hundreds of girls named
George.