About the name Josefa
Josefa belongs to the Portuguese tradition. Its roots are documented, even though its precise meaning is not recorded in the standard references — an honest gap we prefer to a confident guess.
In the United States, Josefa first appears in Social Security records in 1881. It climbed to its best-ever rank of #554 in 1890, and in 2024 18 babies received the name — 4,050 in total since 1880. Those are the official counts, not estimates.