A world map of your surname's prevalence

my name is found in Canada and Germany and nearly nowhere else. a slightly different spelling of the name (one s instead of two) has Germany and for some reasons a dark blue spot in Uruguay.

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My last name is most prevalent in England, USA, Canada, Australia, Nigeria, and then finally South Africa - it’s one of the 500 most prevalent surnames in the world.

My maternal grandfather is a Polish immigrant, and goes by an anglicised variant (which is my mother’s maiden name); I’m pretty sure that I know most of the people on the map with that specific variant, but I seem to have lots of relatives in Poland: the original spelling outnumbers our variant by over 10:1, concentrated mostly in Poland.

Kernow. I fing knew it.

I love Cornwall, beyond all love of places geographic. My soul is Cornish, so fk knows what my family was doing in Cork and Lancashire. I’m from Cornwall. Well - recently.

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Yes. It’s not necessarily confrontational - it’s just a reality in surnames that shouldn’t be.

Never lived there, mind. Just land o’ my fathers.

Dad was one of the brave few who ventured across the Tamar.

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“The meaning of this surname is not known.”

I’ll make a wild guess that the people behind this aren’t connected in any way to Scotland.

[And another guess that the couple of really wild variant spellings with one member each in the States might be an Ellis Island thing.]

Interesting, but many of us involved in researching our family trees are extremely cautious about the sites we use. “.io” is the Indian Ocean area, which tells me the info contained in this site probably no more than an aggregator of databases available through other, and possibly more reliable and protected, sites, such as http://www.publicprofiler.org/index.php.

Just about all of the sources listed on forebears.io have been and are available from other genealogical sites and many of the resources are even free. And I certainly don’t want to contribute to this site with their copyright statement- “All content submitted to Forebears by 3rd parties remains the copyright of the contributor. By submitting content to Forebears a 3rd party gives Forebears a perpetual licence to distribute that content.” Reputable genealogical sites are a lot more conscientious in regards to privacy, considering many people post family pictures and stories not publicly available on the interent and most family tree sites allow its users to block public access to posted content, epsecially important if you’re dealing with people who are still living or who are minors.

There’s also this article: https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-k-is-making-web-domain-profits-from-a-shady-cold-war-land-deal/.

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Look up the 1940s sometime, it might explain your befuddlement about the lack of Jewish names in central Europe.

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I don’t see a relation between the holocaust and a Jewish name existing only in Australia. nojaboja’s point of b0rken big data is quite likely.

I get that. My point is that it’s not completely implausible that the family was wiped out except for one or two who made their way to Odztrillia pre- or post-war.

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My fake surname was supposed to be much more common. I guess I should have checked. Everything as expected with my real one.

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Well, thank you for the history lesson. You may be surprised to learn that in spite Hitler’s highly efficient operation Central Europe still has Jewish people many of them with Jewish names, I am among the living proof…

Point here was different, maybe too nuanced?

  1. The map is historic using data going back to at least 19th century i.e. pre 1940.

  2. Accessing census data is tricky business and not all nations have similar attitude to record keeping and record sharing. And while this map claims to be a world map of names, my very cursory testing of it indicated to me that although the makers had good access to the records of white settlers in the Americas and Australia other written records such as minorities in Central Europe seems to be very patchy.

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disappointed

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The points you and I are making are not mutually incompatible.

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Uh, who manages this list? @OtherMichael? @crenquis? We need to make a process for this stuff. :smile:

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I have some lonely cousins in India, New Zealand, and Zambia.
235 With my Ellised surname, but there are only 148 of the non-Americanized version…
Ellised:


Original:

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Your surname is droptables?

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@jlw is the canonical Canonizer of Disappoint.

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Approximately 19 people bear this surname

Not sure if I believe that.

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Mark and I actively manage it. Any one of the team could add a soul to the list.

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