Yesterday was tagged Super Saturday in the UK as the pubs, restaurants and hairdressers were allowed to reopen again for the first time in over 3 months.

Fold3.com were doing a free 15 day access to a set of war records, which got me started thinking about this again. I’ve been watching a few YouTube videos and seeing various other people using spreadsheets and have decided to keep things simple for the time being and just collect some data.

Just installed rbenv and ruby on WSL and am in the process of upgrading this site to use Jekyll 4.0 and republish with notes from today.

US focussed, but interesting nevertheless.

Establish the size of the study

  • Federal Census 1790 to 1940
  • Statistical data from 1990 census and 2000 census to find surname’s frequency
  • Studies are broken down into 4 sizes: small (30-300 occurences in 1900 / 2000 census); medium (300-3000 occurences); large (3000-30000); x-large(30000-300000)

    Think about the geographic coverage of the study

  • Look at frequency of the surname in potential countries of origin or migration Consider surname variants

WATCH: pablo briand gensvideowebchannel - the history of surnames API: https://www.census.gov/data/developers/data-sets/surnames.2010.html

Surnames: Counts, Total and by Non-Hispanic Race and Hispanic Origin: 2000 - All Names of Count 100 or Greater

Field | Description –|– name | Last name rank | Rank count | Number of occurrences prop100k | Proportion per 100,000 people for name cum_prop100k | Cumulative proportion per 100,000 people pctwhite | Percent Non-Hispanic White Only pctblack | Percent Non-Hispanic Black Only pctapi | Percent Non-Hispanic Asian and Pacific Islander Only pctaian | Percent Non-Hispanic American Indian and Alaskan Native Only pct2prace | Percent Non-Hispanic of Two or More Races pcthispanic | Percent Hispanic Origin Source: https://www2.census.gov/topics/genealogy/2000surnames/surnames.pdf