Is this normalised at all? It always seems to look like a map of where cities are, although there are some interesting trends, especially if you pick surnames that have more recently become prevalent in a country.
Doesn't seem like it is, and the sibling xkcd is spot on. For rare surnames it's still possible to see trends, especially if you know the high-density areas.
I tried some random surnames for Germany, and while Klein ("Small") is pretty popular, the Latin variant Minor has some obvious hotspot:
https://www.kartezumnamen.eu/en/index.php?sur=minor
Also, TIL: "Ficken" (=to f...k) seems to be a (rare) surname in the northern parts of Lower Saxony.
Might vary a lot based on the country and the name chosen.
Eg. Italy has only been a single state since the 1860s, and regional languages can surface a lot of differences. I entered my mom's southern Italian maiden name and got pretty high correlation to places where her dad's family had ties...
For (very) common names, yes. Checked mine and a few other rare ones on the German map and it 100% matches the few people I know of, or the region where they hail from.
For the Netherlands, https://www.cbgfamilienamen.nl/nfb/index.php?taal=eng/ is a better source. It has an (IMO) better visualization and can compensate for population density. Invalshoek expect it to have better data.
Very interesting, especially for less popular or more regional names.
Would love to know more about how it's done: What is the source of those mapping between names and geo locations? Public phone books to get the address and then some reverse geo-coding?
Here's some of the sources I've seen when working on that topic [1] : Census data, Phone books, Academic bibliographic databases (web of science, pubmed), list of athletes at olympic games, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, ...
How did they geolocate the surnames ? Mine is pretty unique in my country and it's located in the town where I live. Where did they got this information from ?
Interesting, for Germany they don't quote any sources. My guess is that it's from the old D-Info CD-ROMS which used to be quite popular for a while. Obviously they wouldn't mention scraping that data.
Oh yeah ! Onomastics (the study of names) is very cool ! And a nice data point to add to personalized data. I did a project with that a while ago to study discrimination in France (https://namograph.antonomase.fr/) and it worked pretty well as long as you have large samples and stick to distributions comparisons.
This map is ""fun"" if your family/ancestry was affected by the Holocaust. I am of German ancestry, with one branch being Catholic and another branch Jewish. The Catholic surname is still abundant right in the region of origin, the Jewish surname(s) are, well, let's just say they're not there.
For common surnames, yes. Mine is quite rare, and while there are naturally a few hits in Berlin, most are concentrated in Southwest Germany, specifically Stuttgart. But you're right that it would be interesting to see the data normalized to population.
It seems accurate, albeit a bit outdated, for my extremelly rare familly name (I know most of the people who bear it, and we're still clustering around what I assume is our ancestral village), but the more common form of the same name is not in the database.
I concur, my surname exists only twice in Germany. And this map shows the place where I live and where I used to live. The place where my mother lives is not on the map. I guess the map is rather detailed. I'd like to know where the data is from.
I'd love to see this done to something like Lithuania where surname ending differs among men, wives, girls (e.g. Tulas, Tuliene, Tulaite). Also, how do the compound names get dissected (e.g. Mary Scott-Doe)?
Seems like a scam to collect credit card information from browsers that are not safe enough. When I click on the name field I get a message saying "Automatic credit card filling is disabled because this form does not ..."
It's kind of funny, my surname actually does have a huge cluster around my hometown, but my paternal grandfather I inherited that name from was from another part of Germany and only moved here in the 1940s.
One time someone from the USA contacted me on Facebook because he has the same surname, to see if we were related. We weren't, but his great-grandparents were from my hometown and emigrated to the USA around 1900 or so (before WW I, anyway).
Fun fact, in 1998, I did an internship at a local hi-fi shop and met a guy who actually had the exact same name as my father. But wait, there's more: He also was in the same line of work as my father. He did not look anything like my father, fortunately, that would have freaked my out in a big way.
Those are two people from a group of at least several hundred. I'm not sure that's strong evidence. I count it as one those weird coincidences that make life interesting.
Of course, they might be a lot more insurance agents with my surname, but I wouldn't know one way or the other. Also, I like weird coincidences, so I'm rather biased.
That doesn't mean you're wrong, though. I just don't have enough data to support your idea.
Reminds me of a scare I had when I was dating my now wife. We were discussing our families and turns out our mothers had the same first name... and their maiden surnames were the same. It's a fairly common Irish name and there was no traceable relation but talk about a potential freakout! Made for a great bit during my father-in-law's speech at our wedding.
In the part of Scotland I come from there was a distinct lack of variation in surnames - so much so that people would use so-called "tee-names" to identify different families
e.g. My ancestor David Wood had the family tee-name "King":
I'm glad it worked out for you. It is a funny story, though, so don't be mad at me for chuckling a little bit. (I guess the guests at your wedding did so, too.)
A friend of my mother's has to twin sons who married two women who had not only the same first name but also worked at the same company. Both ladies took their husbands' names, so they both had the same names. I imagine it must have been both funny and confusing.
When I last worked as a sysadmin, our ERP software used the name as a primary key for employees, so the idea of having two employees with the same name drives me a little bit crazy. (Even worse, though, it did not use FOREIGN KEY constraints but TRIGGERs. I am not sure about performance implications, but from an aesthetical perspective, this is just wrong.)
our ERP software used the name as a primary key for employees
As someone with a common first name and common surname, this drives me bananas.
I still get emails from my graduate university to email: first.last@uni.edu meant for some undergraduate in a sea of 50k students, and have to reply that I've had that email for 20 years and they have the wrong person with a very common name.
I have to admit I found the very concept of using a value that could change as a primary repulsive from an aesthetic point of view. It's just bad database design.
Still, I feel for you. My primary concern, though, was that it made life more complicated for me. But email adresses were separate from ERP user names, and we did not have two employees with the same name, so first.last@company.com was good enough for our purposes.
Years ago I was in my ancestral village and met a man (with same very distinctive family name) countless generations removed who looked exactly like my grandfather. Even the same physical, stocky build... and yeah, I had to just kind of mind my manners because it was super surreal. Guess it's kinda like the Old Spice commercials - if your granddad wasn't good looking you wouldn't be here?
It has regional heat maps, but I prefer the one provided by surnamemap.eu It seems more granular and more comprehensive (my mother's maiden name is rare and it shows up on surnamemap.eu, but does not on the site that I linked to).
I've actually used the surnamemap.eu site for maaaybe 10+ years. However, I don't know if it's updated, and if so, how frequently it's updated.
It works quite well, but bear in mind that the dataset must be already quite old. Based on my ancestors extremely rare name (only family in Germany) I would say at least 15 years old – but accurate for that matter!
It have some much more up to date info in the UK - it definitely has data from the last 5 years as I can see:
* my last 3 houses
* my sisters uni locations (quite distinctive due to the campus location)
* my family home
* my dads home (post-divorce)
Our surname is uncommon and I know for a fact I'm the only one in my county, my dad in his, and my sister was the only one ever at her uni. Of course there could be others I don't know in these towns, but when we are talking <30 locations total and I know people at each of them and my immediate family accounts for nearly a third of locations...
It would be interesting to see it on the EU level and for other countries (I understand finding the data is the hard part). There's been a lot of migration and millions of people live outside of their countries.
Pretty accurate, at least for the 15 or so surnames I searched. All branches of my family, except one, come from Spain. I rearched most of the surnames and was able to get information on many (Basque, Castillian, Cantabric) and those roots are still reflected on this map. By that I mean they are most dense where they originated (some even 700 years ago), indepedent if they're toponymic or not.
Wow, I have a very uncommon Italian surname, and I was super surprised to see the results. The majority of my relatives were concentrated in where I know them to be, with a few outliers in the north and south.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadAlso, TIL: "Ficken" (=to f...k) seems to be a (rare) surname in the northern parts of Lower Saxony.
Eg. Italy has only been a single state since the 1860s, and regional languages can surface a lot of differences. I entered my mom's southern Italian maiden name and got pretty high correlation to places where her dad's family had ties...
If you search my surname (Sielicki) you can see how there was a resettlement between the lands lost on the east and gained in the west after WWII.
(And for first names, there’s https://www.meertens.knaw.nl/nvb/english)
Would love to know more about how it's done: What is the source of those mapping between names and geo locations? Public phone books to get the address and then some reverse geo-coding?
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/...
[1] https://antonomase.fr/fi/mazieres_bms_names.pdf you'll find the references to some of these examples.
It looks like if you query it directly on the map view here: https://www.surnamemap.eu/unitedkingdom/index.php
Then that shows you the "Places" count from the rankings list here: https://www.surnamemap.eu/unitedkingdom/most_common_surnames...
Should be good for others who don't have a very common surname and didn't find it in the (maximum) 10 pages of results.
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_the_Impaler#Family
Also the bloat-free implementation. Why can't all websites be like this?
Only if you have a blocker that deals with the interstitial ads…
Some nice use w.r.t. social mobility : https://www.amazon.fr/Son-Also-Rises-Surnames-Mobility-ebook...
A good API to work with : https://namsor.app/
And I don't live (or haven't lived) in any of them.
Do you see any (visible or hidden) form input for card number, expiry date and CVV2?
One time someone from the USA contacted me on Facebook because he has the same surname, to see if we were related. We weren't, but his great-grandparents were from my hometown and emigrated to the USA around 1900 or so (before WW I, anyway).
Fun fact, in 1998, I did an internship at a local hi-fi shop and met a guy who actually had the exact same name as my father. But wait, there's more: He also was in the same line of work as my father. He did not look anything like my father, fortunately, that would have freaked my out in a big way.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180404-do-our-names-p...
Of course, they might be a lot more insurance agents with my surname, but I wouldn't know one way or the other. Also, I like weird coincidences, so I'm rather biased.
That doesn't mean you're wrong, though. I just don't have enough data to support your idea.
e.g. My ancestor David Wood had the family tee-name "King":
http://www.pirieonline.uk/history/PFWv1-o/p1444.htm
A friend of my mother's has to twin sons who married two women who had not only the same first name but also worked at the same company. Both ladies took their husbands' names, so they both had the same names. I imagine it must have been both funny and confusing.
When I last worked as a sysadmin, our ERP software used the name as a primary key for employees, so the idea of having two employees with the same name drives me a little bit crazy. (Even worse, though, it did not use FOREIGN KEY constraints but TRIGGERs. I am not sure about performance implications, but from an aesthetical perspective, this is just wrong.)
As someone with a common first name and common surname, this drives me bananas.
I still get emails from my graduate university to email: first.last@uni.edu meant for some undergraduate in a sea of 50k students, and have to reply that I've had that email for 20 years and they have the wrong person with a very common name.
Still, I feel for you. My primary concern, though, was that it made life more complicated for me. But email adresses were separate from ERP user names, and we did not have two employees with the same name, so first.last@company.com was good enough for our purposes.
Currently it's just highlighting big cities for any surname I could think of.
It has regional heat maps, but I prefer the one provided by surnamemap.eu It seems more granular and more comprehensive (my mother's maiden name is rare and it shows up on surnamemap.eu, but does not on the site that I linked to).
I've actually used the surnamemap.eu site for maaaybe 10+ years. However, I don't know if it's updated, and if so, how frequently it's updated.
https://www.surnamemap.eu/netherlands/index.php?sur=van+der+...
https://www.cbgfamilienamen.nl/nfb/detail_naam.php?gba_lcnaa...
EDIT: actually, it works if I use "vd Zwan", which is fine by itself, but that contradicts the instructions on top of the page:
https://www.surnamemap.eu/netherlands/nl/index.php?sur=vd+zw...
* my last 3 houses * my sisters uni locations (quite distinctive due to the campus location) * my family home * my dads home (post-divorce)
Our surname is uncommon and I know for a fact I'm the only one in my county, my dad in his, and my sister was the only one ever at her uni. Of course there could be others I don't know in these towns, but when we are talking <30 locations total and I know people at each of them and my immediate family accounts for nearly a third of locations...