It's Saturday Night -
time for more Genealogy Fun!
Our mission from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing is to:
1) How many entries are there on Find A Grave for
your exact current surname, and the birth surnames of your grandparents?
What about your spouse's grandparents birth surnames?
Here's mine:
I use Find a Grave a lot and it is the source with the most
entries in my genealogy database software, RootsMagic. Of the surnames I have,
I would guess that Johnston will have the most.
Below are the match numbers for surnames I’m researching, listed in alphabetical order. See if I am
right.
Coor: 1,761 matches.
Davey: 19,448 matches.
Gleeson: 9,225 matches. I didn’t expect that many for that spelling variation.
Hork: 2,781 matching records. Scrolling through some of them, I see the ones who are in my family, others that seem to be buried in Catholic cemeteries, and others buried in Jewish cemeteries.
Hutson: 13,322 matches. Sometimes this name can be rendered as Hudson, which probably has many more matches.
Johnston: 196,111 matching records. I am not
surprised by that. It is a common name, though not as common as Johnson.
Lancaster: 31,423 matches.
Loveless: 8,531 matches. Sometimes it is rendered as
Lovelace, which has 10,552 matches.
Selman: 3,564 matches.
Sievert: 2,607 matches.
Sullivan: 221,756. Now, that was a surprise!
Wollam: 932 matches.
Wollenweber: 334 matches.
Well, I was wrong about which had the most. The winner is
Sullivan with over 200K memorials! I was actually surprised Hork had more than
Wollenweber, Wollam, Coor, and Sievert. I have never met another Hork except in
my own family. I think that many are actually Russian Jews and perhaps their
name has been shortened. My Horks were Catholic Germans from Westphalia.
Wow, you have a lot of uncommon surnames. That makes for interesting research if records can be found. Without looking at your numbers, I would have picked Sullivan as the most common, followed by Johnston. I tend to think of Lundqvist being fairly common, but only in Scandinavia!
ReplyDeleteWell my husband's Swedish family, Nilsen were actually Nilssons and there are a lot of them in Sweden!
DeleteI'm with you. I would have predicted Johnson to be the biggest number also. Maybe a lot of Sullivans are big into family history. :)
ReplyDeleteSo his Nilsens were originally Nilssons? Nilsson is how my friend here in Portland spells it. His grandparents were Swedish, but his father was born in Denmark.
Yep. Norman's great-grandfather was away to pastor school and there were too many Nils Nilssons so he changed the spelling. His siblings who also came to the US did, too, but the siblings who remained in Sweden kept the old spelling.
Delete