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Website maps surnames worldwide

by Sanjay Jha | August 30, 2008 at 09:29 am

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Imagine when you come across people with same surname but can't find any common ground. People are always interested in knowing about their forgotten family history and relative spread all over the world. Now a team of geographers in university college in London have made a website which will enable people to maps surname. Researchers have found that most surnames started in location in some part of the world and have often spread to other localities/countries because of migration. The website has become an instant hit and currently struggling to cope with demand.

The website have datas of a billion people in 26 countries with details of origin of different names and their family history scattered around the world through migration. The wesbite also maps about 6.5 million forenames that are most likely closely associated with different surnames and lists the top regions and cities for the presence of each last name.

A website which maps global surnames has been launched to help people find the origins of their name and how far it may have spread.
The Public Profiler site plots eight million last names using data from electoral rolls and phone directories.
The site covers 300 million people in 26 countries, showing the origins of names and where families have moved to.
David Beckham, for example, has an English name, but there are more Beckhams in the US than Britain.
But the region of the world with the highest concentration of people called Beckham was even further from the footballer's east London origins - in the New Zealand province of Northland.
The site - www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames - also reveals which of the five million forenames are most closely associated with different surnames and lists the top regions and cities for each surname.