It is funny how we look up our surname as if we only have 1 family.
FWIW, I looked at my other grandparents’ surnames (the two I care about, the probable bigamist grandfather who fucked off with the tax man in pursuit, abandoning my grandmother and 5 kids can do one - and his surname was too boring and generic to bother looking up anyway), and they’re both pretty rare - 3500 of one, 1000 of the other.
And even then, my maternal grandmother’s name isn’t what it should have been.
No idea what the other great grandparents surnames were.
As some of you might have started to figure out, people came to Brazil from all over around a century ago and then hushed about it so a bunch of latecomer gringos wouldn’t crowd the beaches on national holidays.
Fast forward to today (some… stuff happened) and we mostly have cool mutt ethnicities like my own Northern-Italian-West-African-Portuguese-Dutch-Native-(South!)-American one. Or just Brazilian for short.
(Just kidding about the latecomers, we welcome all with open arms.)
Click search. Feel sympathy of the Hamsters running their servers having an aneurysm. See if you get a map up. Maps are now loading most of the time for me, earlier they were not loading at all.
edit: back to no maps for me. url should be something like http://forebears.io/surnames/smith where smith is the surname if you want to try directly and bypass search page (and still get a very busy server) It seems to load the maps within 5 min or so.
Most posted so far have vaguely fit the “western european origins, but now common all over the Americas, Australia and maybe Russia” archetype. Come on, diversity! Show yourself!
I tried to write this a bunch of times, because it sounds more confrontational that I mean it to be. That said…
Plenty of the diversity in the US, perhaps all of the Americas, wouldn’t show up on this kind of map. The descendants of slaves could view this whole thing differently than the descendants of immigrants who moved freely.
No, because that’s apparently everyone’s result. See above.
Fair enough. I have a bit of an issue with the wording of “moved freely” considering how many immigrants were escaping desperate poverty, war and who knows what else to make the “pack up the children and leave everything you’ve ever known forever for a strange new land” plan look like the reasonable option.
