What does your name reveal about your location?

So many people like to think of themselves as anonymous, however there are so many ways that you can be tracked down through your name.

I have met several people here on this forum who for obvious reasons would rather their surnames not be made public as there are certain factions who if discovered their names could potentially come after them for a multitude of unfounded reasons.

Sometimes, it is not what the person today stands for but what connections their family had in past generations. Consider how you would feel about having the name Hitler for example, even though you may not resonate with what the name represents, others who met you would undoubtedly create judgements based on your genetic ancestors.

I found this site today that lead me to thinking about how if I chose to find a particular surname, this would be a good start.

Check it out, it is actually kind of fun to put all of your family names into to see where there are clusters of your family names.

www.publicprofiler.org...

Of all the places in the world, Ireland has the highest concentration of my surname. But I already knew that. Cool tool

My original surname is the same as the region in which I was born and in which my ancestors lived, worked and died for several hundreds of years before me. Only a few such surnames in every so-many thousand in the UK, and all originated in the same region. I'm very content with the ancestors I inherited and glad to be part of their family and region

Great find. Sadly, not areas are available. Africa and Middle East are totally depopulated according to this. But it can be good tool for Europe and North America.

Well, that was indeed interesting. My surname is British in origin, although our family heritage is Celtic, spanning Ireland, England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. So the following results were entirely expected with one solitary exception:

UNITED STATES
CANADA
UNITED KINGDOM
SWEDEN
INDIA
GERMANY
NEW-ZEALAND
BELGIUM
DENMARK
IRELAND

India? India!!! WTH? Really? No Wai!

There are apparently about 2,000 people in India with my Surname...and they most common first names of my distant brethren in India are named "JAMES", "ROBERT", "JOHN", "DAVID", and "WILLIAM". I guess I'll be much nicer to Customer Support Technicians in India now when they tell me their name is "Jim" or "Dave".

This was really neat. Thank you for posting this!

reply to post by antar

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Dang, nailed it on the head for mother's maiden name. Down to the fact that we're from Puglia and Urbino, Italy.

Kinda interesting, but it didn't even have my paternal ancestry in the top 10.

Haha, look up Hussein. Denmark, Australia, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand.

Missed it by that much!


[edit on 15-9-2009 by digger2381]

Very interesting indeed. Wow, never knew my surname was common in Canada of all places, and Europe blows my mind. Anyway I am of several races so that would kind of explain it.

[edit on 15-9-2009 by Guru97]

I typed in a few other surnames that I'm very familiar with. One of them was dead wrong. The surname of RAUF is not muslim. LOL (At least the people I know named Rauf, who are blonde haired and blue eyed believe the name is German in origin.) They could be wrong.

reply to post by Hazelnut

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LOL
Mine showed zip for the US.

AUSTRALIA
ITALY
ARGENTINA
SWEDEN
GERMANY
NEW-ZEALAND

I did my friends after doing mine and my fiances.

It's a very popular name in Mexico and it came up Zip for Mexico.

Something aint right

reply to post by SLAYER69

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Apparently the site is kind of like Wikipedia. If you disagree with a result, there is an option to submit correct info. Of the seven or eight names I tried, only one was off the charts wrong.

Looks like the UK & Australia for me

reply to post by Hazelnut

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In that case it gets a for entertainment value.

But a big fat for accuracy.

Interesting stuff

UNITED KINGDOM
AUSTRALIA
UNITED STATES
NEW-ZEALAND
IRELAND
CANADA
ARGENTINA
LUXEMBOURG
DENMARK
SPAIN

Celtic Wales
Sounds accurate to me

[edit on 15-9-2009 by Takka]

I found this very impressive i have an extremely rare surname turns out there's only 155 of us in the uk, it nailed my home city as the top city in the world for this name and all the others in the u.k in my county!

[edit on 15-9-2009 by windowlicker80]

I am amazed that Slayer69's was off???

As for mine it was weird because when I spelled a maternal name as I knew it to be way back then it came up zero, but spelled how they changed it after coming to America it was all over.

It was just a fun thing to do on a rainy Tuesday morning.

I always enjoy these kinds of threads.

I'm Canadian, and my ancestry is from multiple European countries. Apparently there aren't many of us left back in Europe, because Canada showed extremely high (254) followed by the USA at 191. Australia had 53, which surprised me, then UK at 19 and New Zealand at 15. (also a surprise, but fits with Australia) Ireland and Norway had 5 and 1, and the rest were under 1. Given my genealogical history, I expected Canada, USA, England and Germany to make up the top 4, and I am 1/4 Norwegian, but on my mom's side, so it's unrelated to my surname.

Zooming in on Europe, the few places that had any people with my surname are the ones that people with that name originally came from or else the countries that the rest of my ancestry comes from.

Just tried my mom's maiden name, and it shows up only in Canada, with a 0.46 score :p (a few other areas have grey, but the numbers must've been too small to show up) However, my great-grandparents anglicized it when they came to Canada, so that actually makes sense. The unanglicized version has a 16 in Norway where it is from, and then spain 0.1 and USA 0.06.

Trying a bunch of names in my family tree, I think there's a bug on the website when it comes to Argentina and India. They're always showing up with colours but never in the top ten list, except one name had India at about #5. To test that, I just tried 'mohammed' and Argentina again got coloured, despite not being in the top 10. India was also, but it was the #1 place for that name, so it's legit that time. Just tried some more legit names and every single time it shows up in India and Argentina, even when I'm pretty darned sure it's not common there.

Should have been Norway first cause thats where the name is from, weird.


FPM
SWEDEN 336.22
UNITED STATES 30.26
NEW-ZEALAND 19.05
NORWAY 18.66
CANADA 16.96

Interesting indeed...

US 0.58
UK 0.04

And no info on the root of my name. Should I feel special or rootless lol?

reply to post by windowlicker80

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Rare? 155? There are about 15 people with my surname! And indeed the software pointed to my home town and that of my cousins. That's sort of freaky.