Surname distribution

Randy Seaver over at Genea-Musings (I think it should be Gene-Amusings) has posted his Saturday night Genealogy fun, and it highlighted an interesting website, PublicProfiler.com (http://www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames/) where you can enter a surname and see the worldwide distribution of that name. Clicking on the country, will then give you a breakdown, and statistics are displayed both in map form and in chart form.


I entered my maiden name "Osmer", which as far as I've ever known originated in England, and was surprised to see that the US breakdowns didn't include the states that my family were from as any of the major Osmer settlements! It included the state my dad currently lives in, but shows a large number of the surname in another county than he is in, and doesn't register his county at all. Hmmmm. I also learned that there is evidently quite a decent contingent of the family also in Germany and Argentina. Go figure.

This obviously has genealogical ramifications, although for now I'm just really even more curious about how I'm related to all those foreign folks!

Interactive Historical County Boundary Map Online

I am just so thrilled with this site, that its worth yet another mention. Most genealogists are familiar with the "must have" book, Map Guide to the US Federal Census, by William Thorndale and William Dollarhide - you just can't do census research without it! But recently I found a website, hosted by the Newberry Library (Chicago), that really is incredible. Not only does it show historical county boundaries, but you can search every year, not just the census years. From the "Atlas" main page, at
http://www.newberry.org/ahcbp/state_index.html, pick the state you're interested in (although unfortunately data isn't available for Georgia and Tennessee at this point) and then from the map that opens, choose the dates that you're interested in. Just like we're used to, the current county boundaries are visible in the background, with the boundaries of the dates chosen are in black. You can zoom in and out which is really helpful in states like Texas that have something close to a zillion counties.

Another really neat thing is back from the main page, underneath each state's map link is the word "metadata". If you click on that, you can view all of the documentation that goes along with each map, including commentary, bibliography, and the all-important "preferred style citation" information, so that you can easily and properly cite your source!

I've "tweeted" about this already a couple of times (I'm "rcurious", in case you tweet too), but I think its just such a great genealogy tool. The Newberry Library has some other way cool gems for genealogists, but I'll save that for another blog!