Trying to catch up on my e-mail backlog, I came upon the World Names Profiler through my NEHGS newsletter. "The site plots 8 million names, using data that comes from electoral rolls and telephone directories around the world. Covering 300 million people in 26 countries, users can see where certain surnames originated, and where they have migrated to."
Here, for example, is the Wightman distribution map.
(Click map for larger image.)
The site also tells me that "Wightman" belongs to the "European-Other Western" group, that's it's an English language name of the English subgroup, that it is most frequently found (relative to overall population) in the United Kingdom, followed by New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and Canada, and that the most common first name coupled with Wightman is John.
Check it out. It seems to have a limitation when it comes to umlauts, however. "Stücklin" produced no results; "Stuecklin" occurs infrequently and only to any degree in Germany and Denmark. However, "Stucklin," without the umlaut, is truly a Swiss name, with very small additional populations in France and the United Kingdom. The top three cities? Basel, Binningen, and Riehen.Janet sent out the link without the source, so of course I rediscovered the umlaut schizophrenia all over again. My conclusion is that the Germans and the Swiss must somehow have recorded the Umlauts differently, because Germany is abundantly populated with Muellers, while Switzerland teems with Mullers. In reality, there is no such disparity, and both countries boast a sizable population of Müllers.
The highest FPM I found was for Suzuki in Japan. Who can find more?
Suzuki in Japan is a lot: 12906.22.
By contrast, Wightman in the UK is 66.97, Stucklin in Switzerland is 8.31, Langdon in Australia is 135.27, Daley in Australia is 310.4, and Campbell in New Zealand is 2870.09. It's amazing how often names with origins in the UK have a higher FPM (frequency per million) in Australia and New Zealand.
Smith in Australia is 12254.2.
Porter thought a Korean surname would win hands down, but Korea is not part of the database.
The highest I've found so far is 24419.36 for Sharma in India.
This seems to be a good place to mention that I wouldn't mind at all if Stücklin (however you spell it) ventures to establish a foothold in the U.S. :)
Sorry Mom, but I'm not planning on having enough kids to effect parts per billion.
Time, my dear, time. If a Stücklin had come to the U.S. at the same time as your ancestor William Brewster did (1620), and he and each of his children each had four children, the current U.S. FPM would be about half the current rate in Switzerland.
www.whitepages.com gives me 9 hits for "stuecklin" (of which most in Omaha, and spread over only 7 separate residences), and one hit for "stucklin" (in Bentonville, of all places). Just moving over there alone would make a significant statistical dent! (Oh, and parts per billion: every kid would be 3 ppb in the US.)
Sharma is incredible! Almost a quarter! The odd thing is I don't remember even having heard that name.
According to this link, Porter's guess is good, but doesn't beat Sharma.
Whoops, I mean a fourtieth. But even so, quite amazing, especially considering that wikipedia has a long, long list of frequent Indian names: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_common_surnames#India. Gupta comes close to Sharma, but Patel is way off.
I'm baffled that Sanchez doesn't even make it into the Spanish top ten, but Garcia handily displaces Sharma - but of course with my 1/4-1/40 mix-up Kim is back in the running and pretty much a shoo-in. There are only 26 countries - do an area search and then search for the top name, but I'm now with Porter and doubt that anything will beat Kim, Yi, and Pak...
