Distribution of surnames

[Roger in Sussex]

I remember that about 2 or 3 years ago there was a website which gave information on the distribution of surnames in England and Wales based on one of the census, 1881 I think. One could type in a name and a map would come up.

Can anyone please tell me the url of the site?

[Caroline]

http://www.nationaltrustnames.org.uk/

Is the one you are looking for?

[Roger in Sussex]

Yes, many thanks Caroline, that's the one.

[Olde Crone Holden]

Roger

Do be careful - I forget which site it is now, but one of these surname distribution sites gives the results in percentages, not hard figures.

Thus you get a 100% concentration of the name Harris, for instance, on the Isle of Egg, because only eight people lived there, all called Harris, and a 1% concentration of the name in London, where there are thousands of Harrises.

The unwary could draw misleading conclusions!

OC

[Heather Positive Thinker]

My bugbear O.C. with that site is to think our taxes funded it - lol.

I actually wrote to the people who produced the maps when I found a huge concentration of Horsteads on the Yorkshire Moors and not even a mention in London ! There was one family on the Yorkshire Moors called Horstead, several hundreds in London by that time but as O.C. says, the guy told me that they have worked out the density of names from post codes and the percentage of people in that post code with a name. So 10 Horsteads in a sparse population of say 1000 would read as 1% of the total population with my surname. But in London the several hundred Horsteads who had migrated there from Norfolk dont even register as existing against the couple of million population already in the area.


To be honest, I think its worse than useless because anyone just glancing at that for a rare name like mine would assume that the most of them were stuck in Yorkshire and it was totally the opposite! Very misleading and you wonder how they got funded to do it. You can imagine the team working on it praying that no one actually asked that question - lol. And I dare say most people wont because they wont have a rare name which they can pinpoint accurately.

[Christine in Herts]

I thought it was originally an academic study. ?At LSE or somewhere?

It does have a kind of interest. It doesn't tell you where the bulk of a surname is, but it does give you a feel for where they dominated the area (or not).

Christine

[Olde Crone Holden]

Christine

But the results would have been SOOOOO much more useful presented in hard figures, THEN as a percentage.

OC

[Christine in Herts]

Christine

But the results would have been SOOOOO much more useful presented in hard figures, THEN as a percentage.

OC

Definitely not going to argue with that!

Christine

[Roger in Sussex]

Thank you for the warning folks

Roger