Comments on: Surname Surfin' Sur-prises

Surname Surfin' Sur-prises

dgaicun — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:38:44 -0800

World Names Profiler is a pretty amazing Flash tool, that allows you to see where other people with your last name are distributed across the world, in frequency per million, right down to the city and regional level. Fun to pair with the NameVoyager.

By: cavalier

cavalier — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:43:02 -0800

Hey, that is quite a neat find! Thanks!

By: piratebowling

piratebowling — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:43:35 -0800

(sigh) The website made the same mistake everyone makes about my last name: it's Slovak, not French.

By: maxwelton

maxwelton — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:47:06 -0800

Huh. Shows how little I know about the family history on my father's side: ARGENTINA - 205.97 POLAND - 160.44 NETHERLANDS - 140.61 BELGIUM - 9.17 SWITZERLAND - 7.67 CANADA - 5.5 UNITED STATES - 5.49 The name's origin is Polish, apparently. My father is Dutch. (I'm lazy.)

By: Rumple

Rumple — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:50:51 -0800

Slovakia is landlocked, so what else are pirates meant to do there? It's interesting to scroll down to the numbers for some of the classic Quebec "founder effect" names which are ultra common there and not in France. For example, search on Lalonde Trottier Gagnon

By: SteveInMaine

SteveInMaine — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:51:25 -0800

They couldn't find my surname, Lithuanian though it is. I tried alternative, non-Ellis island spellings as well.

By: JaredSeth

JaredSeth — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:51:58 -0800

I was sure my surname would be most common in the States, and it wound up being Australia by a not insignificant margin. G'day.

By: LarryC

LarryC — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:52:58 -0800

This would be a lot cooler with more countries represented. From the FAQ "What countries do you have data for? We have data for 26 countries in Europe, America, Asia and Oceania." Basically it is Europe and North America, plus Argentina, India, Australia and New Zealand.

By: bettafish

bettafish — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:53:38 -0800

Hey, my name is SLOVAK, not POLISH! Goddamnit. (I mean, it's probably both, but oy.) Interestingly, there are so few of us out there that I can zoom in the map and go, "Hey, that tan splotch in that state is me! And there's my brother!" But for some reason my dad and my uncle's entire line of the family are missing. Which I can't say I'm thrilled by, because it means bro and I are statistically overwhelmed by some crazy anti-gay Southern Baptists who share our surname. (We've been keeping a wary eye on them via Google for a few years.) Also, where's the NATO general dude? Is he the one in Poland? I thought he was in Switzerland. Hunh.

By: giraffe

giraffe — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:55:17 -0800

Huh. My name is barely popular in the US. I had no idea there were so many Irish people in Luxembourg.

By: griphus

griphus — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:55:23 -0800

I've got a Russo-Anglicized Jewish last name and this was the result: ARGENTINA22.75 UNITED STATES3.98 The "properly" Anglicized version of my last name comes up with this, though: UNITED STATES127.12 AUSTRALIA18.12 How odd!

By: piratebowling

piratebowling — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:55:41 -0800

We Slovaks just never get our dues, huh bettafish?

By: Sangermaine

Sangermaine — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:57:46 -0800

It really doesn't like it if you try inputting a non-romanized surname, it seems to be completely missing data for a large number of countries, and there doesn't seem to have been any effort put into normalizing their data. I guess it's just a novelty - a fairly interesting visualization of this information - since there hasn't been any effort put into actually collecting or processing the underlying data.

By: rtha

rtha — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:00:40 -0800

Huh. Apparently, my last name is of German origin. It's really, really not. At all. According to this, there are Germans with Hawaiian names. According to the website. Whose maps are by OnoMap. ("Ono" means "good" in Hawaiian.)

By: rtha

rtha — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:01:22 -0800

Oh yeah - re the Slovak thing - another family name is Czech. But the map pus the name in Austria.

By: giraffe

giraffe — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:01:42 -0800

I know it's because they don't have the data, but it's kinda funny that it reports zero people with the name Motamedi in Iran.

By: From Bklyn

From Bklyn — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:05:23 -0800

Shortcomings not withstanding, it was cooler than falling off a chair.

By: supermedusa

supermedusa — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:06:15 -0800

my family names generated pretty much exactly the results I'd expected (they are neither Slovak, nor Polish)

By: Metroid Baby

Metroid Baby — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:13:00 -0800

"Wictorio" is apparently the second most common first name among people with the surname "Vagina."

By: craichead

craichead — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:13:29 -0800

Ok, that's just weird. My name is really common in Austria, which kind of makes sense, because that's where my paternal grandparents were from. But it also says that the roots are Jewish, subgroup Jewish, language Hebrew, and that comes as a *total* surprise to me. I am Jewish, but I always thought my name was German. I've met a couple of other people with my last name, and none of them have been Jewish. I'm actually a little curious about how the "roots of this name" thing works, because I'm a little skeptical.

By: tommasz

tommasz — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:14:01 -0800

Unsurprisingly, people with my last name mostly live in Poland, with a scattered few of us in the US. We're stay at home types, I guess.

By: lilkeith07

lilkeith07 — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:15:30 -0800

It seems pretty accurate for my name. Although there are 2 different spellings of my last name, on being KEI (the right one) and the second KIE (the wrong one) the KEI one seems to have the larger amount of people.

By: Skot

Skot — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:15:58 -0800

My Estonian surname baffled the thing. Not too surprising, I guess . . . there's only three of us in the world that I'm aware of.

By: Solon and Thanks

Solon and Thanks — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:16:41 -0800

The map isn't that useful, (Welsh name... now found in all of the big English colonies) but I like the "top city" and "top forename" information.

By: fijiwriter

fijiwriter — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:18:14 -0800

Wow. Got my last name down to counties in Mississippi. Granted, the numbers are off, as my there are three of us in an unlisted county. Still neat, though. Very useful to track down (stalk?) distant family members while travellng cross-country. "Hey, I see we have the same last name, and I know we've never met. But thanks to the Internet I should be able to crash with you on short notice. Right?"

By: klangklangston

klangklangston — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:19:01 -0800

So, I gave this a try, despite knowing that I have an incredibly uncommon last name. While it does represent some folks who are dead (and some whose marriages changed their names), it's kind of interesting to see that the number four entry on the top given names is HAUSMEISTERDIENST, or "CARETAKERSERVICE." Obviously, a distant cousin. And now I wonder if the folks in Florida are the same ones as used to be in Wisconsin, cousins of my grandfather. Everyone else are all pretty clearly traceable.

By: Space Coyote

Space Coyote — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:20:30 -0800

So either there was a great Exodus that I don't know about causing there to be more O'Neills in Luxembourg than in the Republic of Ireland or something is screwy with the "O'-" names in the data they have for Ireland. Also tried with O'Malley and O'Regan, same deal.

By: Marisa Stole the Precious Thing

Marisa Stole the Precious Thing — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:20:32 -0800

My surname dominates France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and ... Argentina? Ben voyons donc!

By: naju

naju — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:26:14 -0800

This returned no results whatsoever for my last name. I wonder if I should be worried.

By: owtytrof

owtytrof — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:26:40 -0800

Yeah, I'm wondering about the recency of the data - the third-highest ranked town for my uncommon surname is a city that none of us have lived in for over 5 years.

By: klangklangston

klangklangston — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:26:49 -0800

Interestingly enough, my last name is as common in America as Wideman is in Argentina.

By: EmpressCallipygos

EmpressCallipygos — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:27:46 -0800

I was sure my surname would be most common in the States, and it wound up being Australia by a not insignificant margin. G'day. I had a similar thing -- I knew my (VERY very English) surname isn't common in the US, but I thought that England would have the most hits. The US is fourth on the list for my kin, as I thought, but England was THIRD. Turns out that most of my kin are actually in NEW ZEALAND.

By: Stynxno

Stynxno — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:31:03 -0800

my surname's top forename is marty. obviously my family enjoyed the 80s a tad too much.

By: bove

bove — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:32:16 -0800

I am very impressed. I know the ancestry of my name which is very uncommon here in the US and it got it perfectly.

By: thomas j wise

thomas j wise — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:34:10 -0800

My Ellis-Islanded version of a Russian last name has been mysteriously turned into something of French extraction. Say what? OTOH, I'm perfectly willing to believe that there are a bunch of us in NY. (Speaking as one of the NY residents.)

By: YoBananaBoy

YoBananaBoy — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:35:58 -0800

We could not found an exact match for "YOBANANABOY". Please search again. *sighs the sigh of the loneliest banana person in the world*

By: Eekacat

Eekacat — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:43:35 -0800

This is cool, but the information is flawed. I have a pretty rare name, and my parents moved to the USA from Europe. The only place our name shows up on the map in the USA is California, where we used to live, and Colorado, where we all live now. There are none of us in California anymore, but we still show up on the map. Public records aren't really all that great apparently...

By: fixedgear

fixedgear — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:43:44 -0800

My Italian derived surname does not exist in Italy, or anywhere else in Europe. Nobody in Central America, South America, Asia or Africa? It seems hard to believe.

By: peep

peep — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:43:52 -0800

My results did not surprise me in the least, since my whole family is Norwegian (although we've been in the US for many many generations). VERY common name in Norway, very uncommon in the US (less than 500 of us?). What's weird is that my surname is 4x more common in one particular area of Norway than in any other area.

By: k8t

k8t — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:45:44 -0800

I tried common surnames from non-Latin alphabet countries and it seemed to not pick up on the country of origin.

By: The Card Cheat

The Card Cheat — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:50:34 -0800

Apparently there are no Chans in China.

By: tangerine

tangerine — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:51:21 -0800

I'm the only one in the United States! They missed that I moved to California four years ago. They also missed my parents and brother in Canada. Hmph.

By: dismas

dismas — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:55:29 -0800

Apparently, my name is classified as "Western European- Other." Guess that's what I get for staying neutral: SWITZERLAND15.33 FRANCE0.54 UNITED STATES0.3 SPAIN0.21 UNITED KINGDOM0.15 Woo-hoo, Switzerland!

By: Postroad

Postroad — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:57:26 -0800

I discovered that there are people with the same last name as mine living right in my own house! I should meet them soon.

By: Comrade_robot

Comrade_robot — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:58:33 -0800

I have a (fairly common, I guess) Chinese last name. It tells me that there are none of us in China, a bunch of us in Japan, and a very few in the USA. This strikes me as incorrect.

By: amarynth

amarynth — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:59:26 -0800

My Czech surname was listed as being Austrian as well. Must be that whole Austria-Hungary Empire thing. The FAQ is not very helpful: What countries do you have data for? We have data for 26 countries in Europe, America, Asia and Oceania. A definitive list of countries that we have data for can be found here [link]. Yeah, there's no link in your link.

By: adamrice

adamrice — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:59:35 -0800

I didn't bother with my own made-up Ellis-Island surname. I tried my grandmothers' surnames, which are distinctive, instead. One is found only in the USA, which strikes me as barely possible. One is also disseminated in Europe and Argentina (!), and is listed as being Muslim (!!). And I thought I knew her. I tried a friend's unusual Polish surname, and that was found most commonly in Belgium and a province of northern Italy. Go figure.

By: TheWhiteSkull

TheWhiteSkull — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:01:01 -0800

Most of the data on my (relatively rare) surname is pretty accurate- it pulls up US locations with a good deal of accuracy (including the city I lived in until the end of last year), and gets the French origins as well (although the largest presence appears to be in the Loire valley, and we had thought the name originated in Normandy). However, it does not record any presence in Canada, and I can assure you that we have something in the neighborhood of 0.12 per million here.

By: nowonmai

nowonmai — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:03:26 -0800

My surname is heavily clustered in southern England where my father is from. And my mother's maiden name is really tightly clustered in West Yorkshire where my maternal grandparents are from. Good! I didn't want any surprises today.

By: vivelame

vivelame — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:03:42 -0800

Eh. Shows how little you know about your candidates for POTUS. Mccain: UNITED STATES59.13 CANADA13.29 Obama: JAPAN32.69 SPAIN1.05 He's not a secret muslim, he's a secret shintoist.

By: crapmatic

crapmatic — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:06:31 -0800

Firefox 3. Check. Flash 9.0. Check. Javascript on. Check. The page shows fine but the map area remains blank. Lame.

By: TheWhiteSkull

TheWhiteSkull — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:09:51 -0800

On further review, the Canadian data seems to be a little off. For my mother's maiden name, it gives Ottawa as the city with the largest presence in Ontario, and does not indicate any presence in Toronto (which is certainly not the case). On the other hand, for Kirkness (another family name on my mother's side) it lists northern Manitoba as the top region. While we know the name to have originated in Orkney, we also know that many men from Orkney joined the Hudson's Bay Company in the 19th century, and that the name became very common around the bay itself.

By: goo

goo — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:12:17 -0800

No surprises here, but I wonder how they rank the names - the top forenames are those of my cousins with the largest google presence, but all of our names are unique. Google search results must count as a database.

By: Lemurrhea

Lemurrhea — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:16:38 -0800

While I'm not surprised that my parents are the only Mintzes in Newfoundland, I'm a little impressed that my uncle's the only Mintz in Ontario. And that there's a bunch in the Prairies. Ever more confusing is the fact that the top forename is 'Saml'. That's not even a real name! It's a usually Jewish surname (misclassified as Other Western, but that's fair), so let's try a typical Jewish forename. Aaron Mintz vs. Saml Mintz

By: Johnny Assay

Johnny Assay — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:27:10 -0800

I just tried my GF's (fairly unusual) last name in this thing. The highest concentration of her family name anywhere in the world is in Johnson County, IA — where she grew up — and the two most common given names listed are those of her parents.

By: dabitch

dabitch — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:29:02 -0800

Can't find me, nor my fathers family, nor his mothers maiden name, nor my grandmothers maiden name - yeah, we are few and far between (and it can't find the surname Dabitch either). It did however find a bunch of people with my mother's first serious boyfriend's surname - I guess he had a lot of kids.

By: C17H19NO3

C17H19NO3 — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:31:50 -0800

According to that there's none of me in my home state of Vermont. Boo.

By: kirkaracha

kirkaracha — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:37:30 -0800

'Wictorio' is apparently the second most common first name among people with the surname 'Vagina.' Is "Allotta" the most common? /ohbehave

By: joannemerriam

joannemerriam — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:47:50 -0800

According to this there's 97 Merriams per million people in Nova Scotia. Since Nova Scotia conveniently has about a million people, that means there's about 97 Merriams there. I only know about 50 of them. Huh. I'm most interested in the fact that the map, which shows North American Merriams and very little elsewhere, supports the family story that our name was misspelled at Ellis Island.

By: twine42

twine42 — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:48:31 -0800

Hah! You're all common. Me? I'm most frequent in NZ at 5.3, despite the fact I'm only found in Auckland. Next most frequent is UK at 4.1 Still, no-one knows where we came from prior to 1800-ish and no-one knows what the surname means (and by 'no-one' I mean everyone my keeper-of-the-national-archives grandfather could find to ask) so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. I guess all non-existant Slovak types are probably coming from one of the European countries in the 26 counted, but since no-one has noticed when others implied this I'll not say it aloud... :)

By: cobaltnine

cobaltnine — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:49:35 -0800

I have a rare Swiss-Italian last name. We know that the frequency of the name is something like 74% Brazil*, 25% USA, and 1% border towns in Italy. It only comes up with the US ones, including a cache in California I'm not particularly sure about. On the other hand, my partner's Ellis-islandized Romanian Jewish name comes up as a Jewish Norwegian name. I wish I knew the pre-islandized one so I could look it up, but he never can remember the way to spell it. *Yes, there are a Brazilian of them.

By: desjardins

desjardins — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:58:20 -0800

Hm, my given name and my mother's maiden name were spot on, though I was surprised to find out there's a bunch of us in Australia. Was there a major Irish immigration to Australia that I never learned about in school?

By: quin

quin — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:10:41 -0800

The Card Cheat : Apparently there are no Chans in China. Heh, I did the same search and noticed that as well. Apparently they all moved to Australia.

By: TheOnlyCoolTim

TheOnlyCoolTim — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:12:32 -0800

My Slovak last name comes up as German, both in the information section and in prevalence. What's with everyone else also having a Slovak last name? Outside of my family I am the only person who's even half-Slovak that I've ever met, to the best of my knowledge.

By: rtha

rtha — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:16:15 -0800

desjardins - "Irish settlers - both voluntary and forced - were crucial to the Australian colonies from the earliest days of settlement. The Irish first came over in large numbers as convicts (50,000 were transported between 1791 and 1867), to be used as free labour; even larger numbers of free settlers came during the nineteenth century, partly due to the Donegal Relief Fund. Irish immigrants accounted for one-quarter of Australia's overseas-born population in 1871."

By: turgid dahlia

turgid dahlia — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:17:54 -0800

Irish! And ginger! Fuck!

By: goo

goo — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:26:18 -0800

Ha desjardins! Yes, there are many people of Irish origin in Australia. I tried my grandmother's maiden name (Mahoney) and there are more in Aus and Canada than in Ireland (and the US, which surprised me). Hah! You're all common. Me? I'm most frequent in NZ at 5.3, despite the fact I'm only found in Auckland. Next most frequent is UK at 4.1 Common? Hardly. My surname got a 4.1 in France (origin) and the next highest were 0.04 in the UK and 0.01 in the US.

By: Elmore

Elmore — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:27:11 -0800

This is fascinating.

By: oddman

oddman — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:29:33 -0800

It's not even all of North America; it doesn't include Mexico.

By: librarylis

librarylis — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:35:56 -0800

So it shows my (common as dirt, English) surname as being most popular in Spain. Actually, when I lived in Spain I was told repeatedly that my last name was a *first* name there (for men) and that my last name need an 'ez' to be a Spanish surname. So, unless every one of those Brits with my surname fled to the Costa del Sol (very possible, god knows) then the map is a little screwy.

By: soma lkzx

soma lkzx — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:37:33 -0800

Yeah, why is everyone on Mefi Slovak? The punchy-button-lighty-map thing at Ellis Island told me there were only 12 of us here. But then again, this map thinks I'm Japanese, so oh well.

By: librarylis

librarylis — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:39:36 -0800

By: Lanark

Lanark — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:57:37 -0800

It contradicts with this data on wikipedia List_of_most_common_surnames It has Zhang as being most popular in Australia, and if you enter Zhāng, the page goes crazy

By: ikahime

ikahime — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:59:04 -0800

They couldn't find my surname, Lithuanian though it is.---->SteveinMaine Well, my Lithuanian family name wasn't even placed in Lithuania. Belgium was the big hotspot. P.S. Your last name is hoopty cool.

By: Liosliath

Liosliath — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:12:54 -0800

I always thought my name was German - but this says it's Nordic. Weird.

By: Hairy Lobster

Hairy Lobster — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:13:45 -0800

Meh, not impressed: it tells me my last name belongs to the MUSLIM/TURKISH group/subgroup when in fact it's a French abbreviation of a German name.

By: horsemuth

horsemuth — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:43:47 -0800

India has the most Hitlers. Huh...

By: TheOnlyCoolTim

TheOnlyCoolTim — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:39:54 -0800

I believe there have even been Metafilter posts about that phenomenon. Apparently some Indian people like to give their kids names of famous people from history. So naming your kid Hitler would hopefully make him a great (as in successful, powerful) politician like his namesake.

By: gudrun

gudrun — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:02:26 -0800

Well it got my last name and both my grandmothers' fairly unusual German maiden names (Pontz and Hotop) correct, but it lists my mother's maiden name as English, though the vast majority of people with that name live in Austria, Germany and Hungary, and my mother is indeed from Germany. It also is completely clueless about my husband's mother's name, which is Austrian, or so we are pretty certain, though they seem to mostly be in Pennsylvania these days. It is freaky that so many people with my friend's French surname wound up in Argentina. He will be quite surprised. To sum up, I would say this is fun, but still very much a work in progress.

By: AmbroseChapel

AmbroseChapel — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:15:24 -0800

Just to note that it thinks Bangladesh is part of India. Basically they've culled information from online white pages, so the data is as good as meaningless, and only exists for countries where there's a whitepages.com equivalent.

By: flibbertigibbet

flibbertigibbet — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:15:46 -0800

Huh. My name is most common in Canada [where I live], then Ireland (...?!?!), then the US, UK and New Zealand. It even got the region my grandparents are from: Saskatchewan. That was unexpected.

By: Sparx

Sparx — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 02:33:24 -0800

Exactly as I expected. Norman name, highest incidence in Normandy - second highest in New Zealand which gets there by virture of having a few people there in a pop. of 4 million. That's my family, that is. /waves. Most popular name is Pascal, which isn't so bad. But also in the list were Line (sic) and Josiane, which I have never heard of, but which are kind of cool.

By: strawberryviagra

strawberryviagra — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 05:30:10 -0800

The most Kunts you'll find are in Germany... I swear there are more near where I live.

By: jermsplan

jermsplan — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 07:00:27 -0800

By: EmpressCallipygos

EmpressCallipygos — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 08:53:30 -0800

My first search for O'Connor told me it's most frequent in Austrailia, with Ireland not even on the top 10 list. Interesting. Searching OConnor turned up the results I would have expected, Ireland topping the list. So what have we learned? Irish people hate apostraphes. Somewhere upthread I read that the site gets its data from the online phone books, and I believe (at least, I've seen) that the Irish phonebooks don't use the apostrophes. In some cases, some people even use "Ni" instead of the "O". One of my best friends is Irish and is fluent in Gaelic; she's an O'Donovan, but at times she Gaelicizes it as "Ni Dhonnabhain" (since "O'" means "son of" whoever, and she's female, she uses "Ni", which means "daughter of"). Say, lemme see if "NiDhonnabhain" is in there...

By: EmpressCallipygos

EmpressCallipygos — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 09:03:05 -0800

....And it's not. Ah well. I actually was very amused when I took my surname down to the state level -- I grew up in Windham County, CT; my paternal grandparents lived there, as did my nuclear family. My paternal grandparents have both died, my brother and I moved away and my parents retired to Massachusetts. My surname is actually kind of "famous" in CT (um, it's on a museum in Hartford, let's just put it that way), so it wasn't surprising to see hits for it in Connecticut. But -- turns out that it is showing hits for my last name in every CT county EXCEPT for the one I lived in. Which means that my immediate family was an absolute LYNCHPIN of demographics. Which can be a heady thing, if you're easily impressed.

By: craichead

craichead — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 09:30:27 -0800

Irish surnames actually create all sorts of problems for databases and other computery stuff. It's been a source of discussion on an Irish studies mailing list to which I belong. There's no established international standard for how to deal with apostrophes in names, and the accent marks in Irish spellings also seem to cause problems. It's not a big deal for this thing, which is just for fun, but it causes problems when you're doing things like searching library databases for all the articles by a particular author. Different journals deal with Irish names differently, and you often have to do a number of different searches in order to come up with all the variations.

By: tehloki

tehloki — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:00:14 -0800

Wow. There are a lot of Caswells in Maine and New Hampshire. It's weird that my distant (great * N) grandfather came here to Ontario directly from Ireland.

By: naju

naju — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:14:33 -0800

I'm seriously the only one that had no results for their name? I was born and raised in the US, so I should be on the census data at least... right? (This is how superhero movies start, isn't it)

By: craichead

craichead — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:15:46 -0800

I was born and raised in the US, so I should be on the census data at least... right?

I doubt they're using U.S. census data. To protect people's privacy, the actual census returns don't get released for 70 years, and I doubt any of the aggregate data they release would be useful for this.

By: Nice Guy Mike

Nice Guy Mike — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:23:55 -0800

Interesting. My surname is rare enough to be statistically insignificant, at least in showing up on the globe map, but it correctly identifies origins, and has a good stab at most common forenames (mostly my direct family) and parts of the world where the greatest concentrations can be found.

By: redteam

redteam — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 03:38:50 -0800

Team is Danish. I'll be damned.

By: EmpressCallipygos

EmpressCallipygos — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 04:47:14 -0800

I was born and raised in the US, so I should be on the census data at least... right? Was your number listed in the phone book in the white pages in 2000-2005? The phone book is where they're getting the data.

By: naju

naju — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 08:29:53 -0800

Was your number listed in the phone book in the white pages in 2000-2005? The phone book is where they're getting the data. Ah, that explains it.