Genealogy Blog

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Where and when do I find 2010 Census surnames?

Sat, 17 Aug 2011 by Andrew

I see that question all the time. I want to know that too. Unfortunately the last names are still not available. I have not seen any note on when they will be. I am pretty confident that the names will end up on http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/ . This is the place where the two previous censuses (1990, 2000) surnames ended up.

Added hundreds surnames starting with 'S'

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 by Andrew

At this point all surnames with English roots have been processed. There are about 17,000 of them.

Recent updates.

Sun, 22 May 2011 by Andrew

Added a bunch of names for leters 'K' and 'R.' Added ethnic data from the census to the majority of the names. The article section of the site was extended with 'American last names,' 'How to estimate the number of unique last name in the USA,' 'Russian middle names,' and 'Ukrainian middle names.'

USA Presidents

Mon, 28 February 2011 by Andrew

Added a new section - 'USA Presidents last names.' It is quite interestng to see ho the names of those great people have developed. A thing to notice is the absence of Obama's name from the USA names list. The name is actually quite rare, there were less than 100 Obamas living in the US in 2000.

Forum is no more

Sun, 23 January 2011 by Andrew

The GenealogyDig forum proved to be worse than useless... It had had almost no meaningfull entries on names or anything even remotely genealogical in it. That would have been just ok. Worse than that, the forum was attacked by a group of spammers... I can keep them at bay cleaning their obsene ads every other hour... But it is just not worth it at this point. Until I figure out a way to get decent contents in the forum, the forum will not be available.

Census 2010 results

Sat, 25 December 2010 by Andrew

Some data from the 2010 Census results are now available to the public. The Census Bureau has released the resident population for the nation and states, as well as congressional apportionment totals for each state.

Helpful visualization

Sat, 23 October 2010 by Andrew

What did I expect to find when looked at my newly redesigned page with the first 100 most popular surnames. I just wanted to see how name popularity had changed for the most common surnames from the year 1990 to 2000. Up and down arrows really help now to quickly grab the essence of the changes.

The first three most popular names clearly kept their top positions. Several other names from the list simply exchanged places. But out of 100 top names all 16 Hispanic names moved up on average by 27 positions. For example, Garcia moved 10 positions from the 18th to the eighth position, Ramirez moved 28 positions from the 70th to 42nd position, Gutierrez moved 106 positions from 202nd to 96th position, and so forth.

It has been mentioned about the rise in number of people with Hispanic heritage in the United States. I was pleased that my research is in line with that fact. It proves the validity of it. I am also glad my web page is good at visualizing things like that. I am looking forward to the US census 2010 data to come out since the 2000-2010 change can prove to be more reflective.

Origin of Houston last name

Fri, 24 Septemb er 2010 by Andrew

We were adding data about a few names originated in Scotland and England. Most of the entered last names started with H. One name cought my attention: Houston. It did so mainly bacause it was the name of the very famous Texan - Sam Houston, a soldier, the third President of the Republic of Texas, US Senator for Texas, and finally governor of the state.Well, that is not really the point here... What seemed really interesting to me was how the name had been formed. It had some history behind it, but I found the simplicity of the name building to be the most interesting part: "In the 12th century Hugh de Paduinan acquired the lands of Kilpeterm and buit a residence there, to which he gave the name of Hugh's Town, now Houston, county Renfrew."
Yes, the famous Texan's name or one of the largest cities in the United States is just literally 'a town of Hugh.' You can view the full description on our web site.

1990 US Census data

Fri, 20 August 2010 by Andrew

The website now also displays some rank information from 1990 US census. All idividual web pages show each name rank in 2000 US census and if possible in the 1990 one. All web pages with lists of names have two additional columns now: Rank in US Census 1990 and Delta in ranks of names between the two censuses. The ranks in the year 1990 were not quite what they were in 2000. For one thing we have a lot fewer of them. For the other they do not take into account that some low count last names really have the same ranks. Every name in 1990 census has its own rank. It is not a big problem though since with low count names ranks can change greatly in a 10 year time frame. This small issue will rarely have any significant effect on the magnitude of rank deltas.

YouTube clips on a surname site?

Wed, 14 July 2010 by Andrew

Yes. Starting today our web site will feature YouTube clips on questions related to genealogy in general and last names in particular. We intend the main topic to be strongly related to surnames but expect it to stray away from that course from time to time. Naturally it will take place when the material is interesting enough to justify the deviations. View them here.

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