Specifically, he asks us to:
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.
Unfortunately, I don't have all my research in a single file.
I have separate files in Family Tree Maker 2014 for my maternal (Swicegood), paternal (Sharp) and husband's (Sommarstrom) families.
So, for my SWICEGOOD file, containing 15,967 individuals, my most frequent names are:
Name Count Males Females Earliest Most Recent
BROOKSHIRE 822 460 357 1690 1974
UNKNOWN 415 32 382 1745 1998
SWICEGOOD 284 149 133 1754 1995
WOOLERY 177 97 79 1739 1919
QUIGG 174 96 76 1784 1973
COFFEY 170 99 69 1776 1962
CRABTREE 168 104 63 1683 1958
BARTSHE 146 67 76 1771 1966
PAXTON 135 80 54 1742 1956
CAMPBELL 133 66 66 1705 1948
For my SHARP file, containing 2266 individuals, the top 10 surnames are:
SHARP * 210 105 104 1746 1996
RYASON 70 33 36 1801 1896
RYERSON 68 37 31 1737 1909
UNKNOWN 52 8 44 1645 1828
SULTS 46 20 26 1805 1981
THOMAS 39 20 19 1735 1896
McFARLAND 37 21 16 1760 1900
REYERSE 34 16 18 1664 1761
STILLEY 34 16 18 1709 1845
SONNEN 33 23 10 1799 1949
Prior to taking the SHARP surname, my direct ancestors were SCHARFENSTEINs. There are 28 of those in my database (17 males, 11 females) dating from 1655 to 1767.
And lastly, my SOMMARSTROM database contains 1880 individuals, with the top surnames being
SOMMARSTROM 161 82 78 1778 1988
ERSSON 65 43 22 1705 1909
OLSSON 58 36 22 1726 1950
ERIKSSON 50 30 20 1704 1959
JOHNSON 48 34 14 1846 1994
ANDERSSON 44 21 23 1693 1977
MILLER 44 21 23 1840 1932
JANSSON 38 20 18 1822 1947
NILSSON 33 22 11 1783 1908
MATTSSON 32 24 8 1701 1960
These surname counts for my husband's Swedish/Finnish lines are pretty meaningless, since most of his ancestors used patronymic names or were children of soldiers, whose surnames were defined by where they were serving at the time the child was born. For almost every "-son" name above, there's a comparable "-dotter" surname.
Unfortunately, I didn't find an easy way to determine how many distinct surnames were in each tree and I'm too lazy to count all the names manually. The frequency lists were easy to create as Surname Reports sorted by frequency in FTM.
