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Mon 6 Jan, 2003 08:54 pm
Found this great site. You type in a surname, and they show the distribution of that name in the US according to each census.
Link to Surname Distribution
My last name showed up as mostly blue, some greenish colors on the east coast, midwest and alaska. My mom's maiden name wasn't even on the list.
littlek- Neither was my maiden name. But my married name was!
I tested a few other names - it's fun. My ex's name is spread almost homogenously across the states - all at the grren level (1 in a 1000?).
1 in 500 in the south.
1 in 1,000 throughout most of the rest.
very interesting link...there seems to be a couple states where my name is found in 1 in 10000 <dark blue>. The rest are blues and greens...almost across the board except a great concentration of green <one in 1000> in NE, which makes sense to me actually.
WOW...my birthname has two states in yellow and all the rest green...how very interesting a difference that is, they're both common irish names.
And my married name, or any derivative of it, isnt in the database at all.
I've been plugging in names and, if I can generalize, the best spread names seem to be irish descent names.
And, then there are smith, brown, jones - all hot colors all across the states.
Have you checked the stats for the different dates? You can get some sense of the immigration patterns.
I just tried a few O' attempts on Irish names to see if that made any difference...yes and no, certainly perplexing.
Not yet Phoenix!
this all quite fascinating.
Great link Phoenix. My name came up in Massachusetts only. I'm sure it would be a whole different story if I were to find a Canada site like this one since this is where my family is from. Where I live, there are people everywhere with my name.
Amazingly, there were some hits for surnames with BIBLE in it - where? I think the map shows Tennessee.
Hmmm. A very even distribution of about 1 in 1000. I swear I've never met 'k, tho.
Logical results:
I got one in thousand in Florida and New York.
One in 5 thousand in Texas and California.
One in 7 thousand in Illinois and New Jersey
Elsewhere, it was dark blue.
My surname is a rather common English surname- and shows up all over the US, but most commonly in the deep South. Where I live, in the Midwest, it is much less common. I think German surnames dominate here; Scandinavian in the upper Midwest.
Since there just live 5 persons with my name worldwide ...
However, quite some hundred of my wife's maiden name live in the states. And with mother's maiden name it's a little bit less.
I gave up a maiden name that was green all over (lighter in the south -- it's a WASPish name) to my married name which is dark blue except for 2 states -- Ohio is light blue and Nevada is medium blue. Great web site.
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