american last names

American Surnames

One could claim that American surnames are very straightforward to describe and identify. Due to the way this country was formed, having people coming here from all over the world, the surnames simply represent all those people of different nationalities. So, we are done, right? Let's just combine all last names of all nations of Earth, and we will have the American surnames... Add the Native American surnames too...
The reality, of course, is not as simple as it seems at the first sight. Even if the assumption above was correct, one still needs to realize that the sheer number of different names occurring in the United States is enormous. Only according to the census, there are more than 150,000 unique surnames in America. And those are just the names bored by 100+ people each. The number of all unique names can be estimated to be as high as 6 millions and more conservatively at 800,000. It is just a conservative estimate though. The real number could be slightly lower or it could be a lot higher but not higher than 6 millions and most certainly significantly higher than 150 thousands.
There is also an implied assumption here. We assume that all names from a particular nation flow to America and become American surnames. That simply is not true. Even the British names did not transfer to the United States fully. I would estimate that three quarters of them successfully crossed the Atlantic Ocean. That is a lot, but that is not 100% even for them. Other nations did much worse. That means that under no circumstances can we generalize and claim that American surnames consist of English, Welsh, Spanish, and so forth... We have to enumerate each and every name, just like we do for every other nation. Only here the task is significantly more difficult due to the extremely large number of names. In fact it seems that this article is really an introduction to a much larger body of work, this whole project that strives to identify and classify American last names.
There are also smaller points that one needs to take into consideration. One is the presence of Native American names and their interaction with the names of the newcomers. Also, since people have moved here from different countries, we need to take into account that the same name could be coming from different countries and hence have multiple meanings and origins. That very same problem exists in country without immigration of course too, but to a much lesser extent. For example, a name that comes from different counties in England, or the most popular name Smith, that although has the same meaning everywhere, but could be coming from multiple villages, counties, cities, and even multiple countries.