Saturday Night Genealogy Fun (Sunday edition!) - 2,331 Surnames

Yesterday, Randy Seaver of GeneaMusings offered up his weekly Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge:

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 how many surnames are in your database and, if possible, which Surname has the most entries.  If this excites you, tell us which surnames are in the top 5!  Or 10!
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'm a day late (and probably a dollar short as well!), but here goes:

I use Legacy Family Tree software, and it has a simple report called "Surname Summary." Using that feature, I found that I have 2,331 surnames in my database.

I exported the list so that I could open it in Excel and sort to find the top 10 names. They are:

1. Yawman - 257 instances - date range of 1750-1994
2. Spurlock - 230 - 1807-1997
3. Burton - 144 - 1784 - 1998
4. Horton - 144 - 1722-1899
5. Eaton - 127 - 1659-1914
6. Gandy - 125 - 1670-1879
7. Wallen - 124 - 1759-1915
8. Justice - 117 - 1695-1847
9. Parsons - 117 -1783-1999
10. Smith - 100 - 1589-1966

At spot #11 were 89 individuals with no surname listed; however, that number is not reflective of the true number of individuals without surnames. For those women for whom I have no maiden name, I enter their married name in parentheses; this helps me keep all those named Mary and Elizabeth sorted out!




© 2013 Denise Spurlock