answer:You might be able to find birth announcements in newspaper archives. You could try calling on the memories of some people who were born then, as to what were the popular names of their generation. Any person who was a major figure of that year or the preceding couple of years (including regionally) might have been someone to honor with a namesake. My father (born in 1919) was named after a popular evangelical preacher of his parents’ generation. Also the top 100 popular names nationally ought to include some hits for your target region. If you are by any chance trying to name a fictional character, would popularity (and hence commonness) for the time and place necessarily be the person’s parents’ prime criterion? The names that were most popular half a century before that, and possibly elsewhere (even in another country?), might supply a grandparent’s name as someone to be named after.