Genealogy Blog

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Where does one get the latest US census data?

Sun, 27 June 2010 by Andrew

Well, one obvious place to look is the US Census Burea: http://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/overview/1930.html The only problem is that nowere on that site you will find the full set of census data. They will eventually tell you that you need to go to one of the larger public libraries and scan the microfilm rolls there. Better yet you can order the rolls for $60 per piece and then again you will have to somehow scan it. A place to get the already scanned information is here: http://www.archive.org/details/1930_census They have the latest publicly available census (1930) scanned, not transcribed but more or less fully scanned. Ancestry.com is where one would go for partially transcribed various census materials. But those guys are pricey.

Added few surnames starting with 'H' and

Mon, 31 May 2010 by Andrew

Changed the layout of the site pages.

Added the capability to view names according to their popularity

Sat, 7 May 2010 by Julia

We still have a way to vew the last names n the alphabetical order but now one can just go thru all the names starting with the most popular ones like Smith and Johnson to very rare and unique like Zusi or Zulu.

Added quite a few changes to the website

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 by Julia

The main ones are here: manipulated the sizes to make the page look tider, added facebook and twitter options, added meaningfull info to the intermidiate pages, and extended popularity based capabilities.

Started a last name of the week list

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 by Andrew

One can subscribe to it on our twitter account @americannames. The first week surname is APE. Would you like to know more?

Surnames with Russian roots marked

by Andrew

I think a majority of last names that have some sort of Russian roots are marked now. Lets share some statistics here. We found about 19,000 very well known unique surnames in Russia. The number goes up to 32,000 when we take into consideration female versions of the names. At the same time we could find about 1,600 of them from that list in America. Also even the 1,600 number does not really give the right impression of how many unique Russian names exist in the United Satates. Many unique names have way too many variations. For example, a unique name SMIRNOFF exists into three versions: SMIRNOFF, SMIRNOV, and SMIRNOVA. The variations happen just because of the conversion between two alphabets and specifics of how the names are formed in Russia and United States.

A new forum. Sort of...

Sat, 19 Mar 2010 by Julia

We recently created a Genealogy forum on www.GenealogyDig.com/phpBB3. It is not populated with much data at the moment and has only three official users, but we hope it will eventually get some traction.

Added hundreds surnames starting with 'M'

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 by Andrew

Didn't see very curious names there. Maybe just the fact that a bunch of names with English origin have been derived from first names Matilda and Margaret.

Complex name searches

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 by Andrew

How do you search for names that start with, say, 'an' ... Well, that is fairly straightforward. You google 'last name starts with an' and hope for the best. The search engine usually provides you with a set of names or sites where you find the names.

What do you do if you need to find all the surnames that end with, say, 'son'... Unfortunately, you are not likely to find anything reasonable.

A web site needs to have a simplified regular expression search capabilities to address that. Not many sites have a search button. I am yet to see one with any kind of patter matching (set aside: 'find surname starting with 'an' type of queries) abilities. That type of query is not very helpful anyway since general search engines take care of them already.

Yes, we got a request like that from a client. No, we could not help the client this time since there is no search button on our site. No pattern matching either.

This is certainly something to think about. We will add the matching eventually. The general search engines will need to be encouraged to show the matching page for the right requests.

Didn't think I would need a blog here...

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 by Andrew

Turned out I was wrong. The twitter account use is interesting, but 140 characters per post restriction seems just too artificial. One can say the project is still at the inception stage with lots of moving parts and many things to work on. The goal of collecting data on a meaningful percentage of American last names seems to be somewhere in the future... But progress is being made, more and more surnames make it to the web site, and we are very excited with how everything is moving forward.

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