Saturday, October 21, 2017

SNGF: Surname Counts

Today's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun (SNGF) from Randy Seaver involves counting the surnames in your genealogy database.
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.