Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing has another assignment this week for us. I have not had a chance to participate because I was away from my computer on vacation.
Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):
1) Go into your Genealogy Management Program (GMP; either software on your computer, or an online family tree) and figure out how to Count how many surnames you have in your family tree database.
2) Tell us which GMP you're using and how you did this task.
3) Tell us what the top 10 (or 20) surnames are in your database and, if possible, how many entries. How many different surnames are in your family tree?
4) Write about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, in a status or comment on Facebook, or in Google Plus Stream post.
I use RootsMagic and Randy was so kind to explain in his blog post how to do this in RootsMagic. It is a report called "Surname Statistics."
I was very surprised by the results. I expected the surname GORRELL to be tops, but rather it was LOVELESS. See the table below.
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The first three names are from my southern roots and these families had very large families, who in turn had large families.
As for the number of different surnames, there were 28+ pages of names. At 53 names per page, the math would be 28 X 53 + 38 (no. on p. 29) = 1522.
There were 16+ pages of names occurring only once (889 names).
Some of the names could have been combined.
- Bischof and Bishop are the same family.
- Horoch and Hork are the same family.
- Eliasson and Lundquist are the same family.
And then there are all of the Swedish surnames that changed each generation. If they had not used patronymic system of naming, the Swedish names would have had higher counts.
Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Suzanne Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.
I have the same situation with spelling variations of surnames. I went ahead and combined mine for the totals.
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