Thursday, February 25, 2016

Map Your Surname


My family now live all around Europe. However, two to three generations ago, I think most of my family lived in and around Northampton in England. This seems to be borne out by the spatial distribution of the surname 'Clarke', as shown by named.

Named is a new website which generates a heat-map showing where your surname is unusually common in the UK. The application is very easy to use. All you do is enter a surname and named shows you a heatmap showing you where there is an unusually high number of people with that name.

'Clarke' is a fairly common surname in the UK but named shows that it is actually unusually common in the Midlands area of the UK, where my family were originally from.

Named also allows you to enter two surnames and then generates a heatmap showing mutual locations with the most people with either of the two surnames.

Named uses data from an old UK electoral roll to work out the distribution of names. The application therefore only works for the UK.

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