[HN Gopher] Map of Surnames in Europe
___________________________________________________________________
Map of Surnames in Europe
Author : Nitrolo
Score : 271 points
Date : 2022-03-03 11:39 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.surnamemap.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.surnamemap.eu)
| goombacloud wrote:
| Data is not clean, I doubt people have the surname "Computer" or
| "Bahnhof" (train station) in Germany
| theomega wrote:
| Also search for City names which yields very suspicious
| results:
| https://www.kartezumnamen.eu/en/index.php?sur=Hamburg&s=Sear...
| https://www.kartezumnamen.eu/en/index.php?sur=Berlin&s=Searc...
| https://www.kartezumnamen.eu/en/index.php?sur=M%FCnchen&s=Se...
|
| I don't think there are that many people called like cities and
| also they don't all live in those cities.
| advanced-DnD wrote:
| Data set is broken... he just want to earn some HN traffic
| and ads money
| sublimefire wrote:
| I'd love to see this done to something like Lithuania where
| surname ending differs among men, wives, girls (e.g. Tulas,
| Tuliene, Tulaite). Also, how do the compound names get dissected
| (e.g. Mary Scott-Doe)?
| emreb wrote:
| Seems like a scam to collect credit card information from
| browsers that are not safe enough. When I click on the name field
| I get a message saying "Automatic credit card filling is disabled
| because this form does not ..."
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| I would not jump to such conclusions - browsers are sometimes
| too clever for their own good.
|
| Do you see any (visible or hidden) form input for card number,
| expiry date and CVV2?
| aosmith wrote:
| What a dumpster fire of ads, how is this on the front page?
| brnt wrote:
| Where does it obtain data in countries without registries (such
| as France)?
| baud147258 wrote:
| doesn't France conduct census? I'm pretty sure I had to get
| registered when I reached the majority age. And, according to
| other comments, the website used phone books (which existed in
| France)
| brnt wrote:
| When I moved there, I didn't have to, or could, notify anyone
| I was living there.
| tsujp wrote:
| Neat, my surname which is Coppard has only 430 occurrences (by
| this datasets authority) in the UK.
|
| It looks like if you query it directly on the map view here:
| https://www.surnamemap.eu/unitedkingdom/index.php
|
| Then that shows you the "Places" count from the rankings list
| here:
| https://www.surnamemap.eu/unitedkingdom/most_common_surnames...
|
| Should be good for others who don't have a very common surname
| and didn't find it in the (maximum) 10 pages of results.
| zfxfr wrote:
| If you want to fill the map of France with red color then search
| for MARTIN.
| uberman wrote:
| seems like just a ad trap to me
| spacemachine wrote:
| Pretty uninspiring results for my surname.
|
| Basically just looks like a population map. My surname isn't
| especially common, but it is quite popular as a first name. So,
| there might be a high chance chance that a lot of displayed
| matches are false positives due to first names misinterpreted as
| surnames.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| this website is an ad-riddles mess
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Install uBlock.
| MarcScott wrote:
| For the names I looked up in the UK, this might as well have been
| a map of population centres. Almost every surname was focused in
| London, Birmingham and Manchester. It's to be expected, I
| suppose, but not very informative.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| Yep, relevant xkcd:
|
| https://m.xkcd.com/1138/
|
| Without a per-capita adjustment, this is near-meaningless.
| notahacker wrote:
| Depends what you're trying to extract from the data. For my
| rare surname, it's tiny circles corresponding to individual
| households, most of the UKs largest cities have no instances
| but there is a cluster of small circles in the towns near
| where my dad grew up. That's more interesting visually than
| the frequency being <1 per 100k population basically
| everywhere.
| folkrav wrote:
| First thing I did was typing up my French originating surname;
| big agglomerate right around Paris, then Normandy (where my
| ancestors came from).
| jollybean wrote:
| It ends up just being a population density map unfortunately.
|
| Names are concentrated in cities, well we knew that. Would be
| nice to somehow normalise a bit for pop. density.
| Scarblac wrote:
| I doubt the accuracy -- my family and I don't show up for the
| municipality I live in in the Netherlands.
| 6510 wrote:
| what great data mining tool, I watch my hands type every surname
| I know in order of familiarity. lol
| wazoox wrote:
| Vaguely related amusing bit of trivia: the word for smith or
| blacksmith is one of the most common names about everywhere:
| Smith (England), Schmidt (Germany), Smit/Smet (Belgium,
| Netherlands), Fabre/Favre/Lefevre/Lefebvre (France),
| Ferrari/Fabri (Italy), Ferrero/Herrero (Spain), Ferreiro
| (Portugal), Kowalski (Poland), Haddad (Morocco), Demirci
| (Turkey), Demirdjian (Armenia), Gof/Goff/Le Goff (Brittany,
| Wales), Gowan/Gowen/Gow/Gough (Scotland),
| Kuznitz/Kuznetz/Kuznetzov (Russia), etc.
| franciscop wrote:
| Also lots of religious names, at least in Spain but probably in
| many romance countries, since last names were derived from the
| father's name: Pedro (given) => Perez (son of Pedro), Alvaro =>
| Alvarez, etc.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surname
|
| https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apellido#Origen_de_los_apellid...
| rodelrod wrote:
| For some reason the version in Portuguese is Ferreira (the
| feminine form), not Ferreiro. No idea what the reason is. I
| somehow doubt that medieval Portugal was exceptionally gender-
| progressive.
| lvxferre wrote:
| It's the feminine because it refers to the family, and
| "familia" is feminine. e.g. "Joao Ferreira" would be "John,
| [of the] blacksmith [family]". That's also the reason a few
| surnames include de/da/do (of/of the).
| rodelrod wrote:
| This explanation makes little syntactic sense.
|
| A bit of googling gives me the explanation of "ferreira"
| being an old word for "iron mine", which to be honest is
| coherent with modern portuguese forms like "pedreira",
| toponymics ("ferreira" is a common place name), and the way
| names come about (Joao da Ferreira would own or work in the
| iron mine, or just come from one of the villages where
| there was an iron mine).
| Zobat wrote:
| But not in Sweden, there's 220 persons with "Smed" as surname
| here. We do have 15 men and 10 women with it as (any of) their
| given name(s).
| emptyfile wrote:
| Kovac(Kovacs, Kovac, Kovach) in Croatia.
| plcguy wrote:
| also Slovakia/Czech
| rootbear wrote:
| And Hungarian (Kovacs)
| ed_balls wrote:
| A pice of trivia: in Polish it should also be Kowal (Koval).
| Land owners were taking the names of the places they owned, so
| if you owned a village called, called Paris, you took the name
| Pariski (adjective). This created a culture of adding a ski to
| your name. There was even a book of peasants that weren't upper
| class, but took that name.
| azth wrote:
| Haddad in Arabic.
| wazoox wrote:
| It's in the list :)
| cinntaile wrote:
| To add to this bit of trivia. In Sweden this was never a thing
| where your job became your surname. If you go to a cemetery
| you'll sometimes see the occupation on the gravestone though,
| especially on older graves and if it was a more higher class
| job.
| mdeck_ wrote:
| Admittedly it seems less common, but... there certainly are
| some Smeds in Sweden (and the rest of Scandinavia). The names
| are not ALL sons/sens and geographic features...
| https://forebears.io/surnames/smed
| 0xBABAD00C wrote:
| Armenian is Darbinian/Tarpinian (Demirjian is the Turkish-
| Armenian hybrid form). There's also related Nalbandian (farrier
| / horseshoe blacksmith).
|
| BTW, the theory I've heard is that this surname prevails due to
| survivorship bias, in countries that were constantly at war and
| the male population was being decimated, the smiths had to stay
| back home manufacturing weapons (same logic applies for
| "miller" and "tailor" and "mayor", all very common last names
| in large parts of Europe).
| eridan2 wrote:
| Not in Romania (the Hungarian name Kovacs is #90, and the
| Romanian names Feraru/Fieraru are not in top 100) But Popa
| (priest) is #1, Popescu (son of a priest) is #2, Cojocaru
| (furrier) is #46 and Szabo (tailor in Hungarian) is #62
| dusted wrote:
| The most interactive thing about this seems to be the banner
| ads..
| nkozyra wrote:
| I thought Google ads had a maximum spots per page, looks like
| there's at least 8 on some pages.
| ohples wrote:
| Doesn't seem to like diacritics (ie accents)
|
| Tried my name in France with/without the accent.
|
| Seems weird for a site related to Europe.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Not a single Dracula in Romania. Hmm.
| kibwen wrote:
| Ah, but in Romanian his name was Vlad Tepes, and while "Tepes"
| has no hits, "Tepes" has several hundred.
| itronitron wrote:
| Szilagyi shows up ... Vlad's second wife was Jusztina
| Szilagyi, ... _She survived Vlad Dracul,_ and married thirdly
| Pal Suki, then Janos Erdelyi.
|
| >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_the_Impaler#Family
| m12k wrote:
| Try "Impaler, Vlad the"
| Aidevah wrote:
| This seems to have answered a longstanding question I had about
| French surnames. I had come across a presentation given by a
| person bearing the name "La Rochefoucauld" and I always wondered
| if she was descended from the eponymous noble family or related
| to the famous writer. This website tells me that in France the
| name "La Rochefoucauld" is uncommon but not rare so I guess the
| answer to that question is "maybe".
|
| I also searched for "Monteverdi" out of curiosity and the largest
| cluster bearing that name are in Lombardy centred around Cremona,
| which was indeed where the famous composer was born four and a
| half centuries ago.
| Bayart wrote:
| It's one of the most ancient and illustrious noble families in
| France. There's virtually no chance somebody would bear than
| name without an actual relationship to the familly. They'd risk
| litigation, for one.
| rodelrod wrote:
| Unless their ancestors emigrated to the Americas in which
| case it's a free for all.
| k__ wrote:
| My surename only shows up 100 times and only in a small part of
| Germany. I don't even show up on that map at all.
| [deleted]
| pixelbreaker wrote:
| https://www.surnamemap.eu/unitedkingdom/index.php?sur=hitler...
| rory wrote:
| Seems like a good local news fluff piece. "The last Hitler in
| England"
| notahacker wrote:
| Suspect it's someone trolling a census. There's also a
| Skywalker in London, which is probably more likely to be
| someone that took the campaign to get Jedi recognised as a
| religion in the UK way too far than the last vestiges of the
| Skywalker dynasty
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Probably a neonazi who changed their name.
| pixelbreaker wrote:
| There aren't any in Germany...
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| You'd have to check Austria, surely?
| pixelbreaker wrote:
| "He is literally Hitler"
| unfocused wrote:
| Very neat. My ancestors are not European, they are Lebanese, but
| I was able to find their last name in the countries they
| emigrated to long ago in Europe, and the cities make sense,
| although there's more than I thought in certain countries!
|
| For those interested, depending on where you live, you can access
| Ancestry.com through the Public Library for free. In Ottawa, that
| was case, although as of Jan. 1, 2022, you have to go in person.
| Through there, you can search by name or even place of origin,
| and you can see the immigration records. May of which even have
| the photos! I noted some people that went to Brazil and could see
| the entire person and his family. I'm sure many people don't know
| that.
|
| I was able to see my Grandfather's record to Canada in 1925 New
| Brunswick, and my Great Uncle's record in 1911 to Omaha,
| Nebraska. I'm also told my Great Grandfather came to the US in
| 1901, but I have been unable to track his record, because after
| having manually reviewed 1000+ records, I can tell you with
| confidence that spelling errors are rampant.
|
| You had names change from say Smith, to Sally, and you can see
| the scratches as the records were modified. It's hilarious! Also,
| they even misspell the names in the same record. So searching is
| very, very hard, and instead you have to put in a broad search,
| like city (which can also be misspelled), and then manually look
| through the records. The only thing that I can say that is pretty
| accurate is the year. So that should be your starting point.
|
| Good luck!
| Ra8 wrote:
| Have you tried looking into the Ellis Island records for your
| Great Grandfather? https://heritage.statueofliberty.org/
|
| I was able to find some of my ancestors who came to the US from
| those records. People usually came by ship and New York City
| was one of the main points of entries to the US.
| james-redwood wrote:
| I'm curious to hear about the migration story? We're there many
| Lebanese immigrants in Europe in the 1800s?
| eddyfromtheblok wrote:
| wow, I found an enclave of my surname on a Catalan island! and in
| the south of the Netherlands, and over the border in Germany,
| which I expected.
|
| also, I'm not seeing any ads using the Vivaldi browser.
| krylon wrote:
| It's kind of funny, my surname actually does have a huge cluster
| around my hometown, but my paternal grandfather I inherited that
| name from was from another part of Germany and only moved here in
| the 1940s.
|
| One time someone from the USA contacted me on Facebook because he
| has the same surname, to see if we were related. We weren't, but
| _his_ great-grandparents were from my hometown and emigrated to
| the USA around 1900 or so (before WW I, anyway).
|
| Fun fact, in 1998, I did an internship at a local hi-fi shop and
| met a guy who actually had the exact same name as my father. But
| wait, there's more: He also was in the same line of work as my
| father. He did not look anything like my father, fortunately,
| that would have freaked my out in a big way.
| coward123 wrote:
| Years ago I was in my ancestral village and met a man (with
| same very distinctive family name) countless generations
| removed who looked _exactly like_ my grandfather. Even the same
| physical, stocky build... and yeah, I had to just kind of mind
| my manners because it was super surreal. Guess it 's kinda like
| the Old Spice commercials - if your granddad wasn't good
| looking you wouldn't be here?
| k4shm0n3y wrote:
| Reminds me of a scare I had when I was dating my now wife. We
| were discussing our families and turns out our mothers had the
| same first name... and their maiden surnames were the same.
| It's a fairly common Irish name and there was no traceable
| relation but talk about a potential freakout! Made for a great
| bit during my father-in-law's speech at our wedding.
| krylon wrote:
| I'm glad it worked out for you. It _is_ a funny story,
| though, so don 't be mad at me for chuckling a little bit. (I
| guess the guests at your wedding did so, too.)
|
| A friend of my mother's has to twin sons who married two
| women who had not only the same first name but also worked at
| the same company. Both ladies took their husbands' names, so
| they both had the same names. I imagine it must have been
| both funny and confusing.
|
| When I last worked as a sysadmin, our ERP software used the
| _name_ as a primary key for employees, so the idea of having
| two employees with the same name drives me a little bit
| crazy. (Even worse, though, it did not use FOREIGN KEY
| constraints but TRIGGERs. I am not sure about performance
| implications, but from an aesthetical perspective, this is
| just _wrong_.)
| Cd00d wrote:
| _our ERP software used the name as a primary key for
| employees_
|
| As someone with a common first name and common surname,
| this drives me bananas.
|
| I _still_ get emails from my graduate university to email:
| first.last@uni.edu meant for some undergraduate in a sea of
| 50k students, and have to reply that I 've had that email
| for 20 years and they have the wrong person with a very
| common name.
| krylon wrote:
| I have to admit I found the very concept of using a value
| that could change as a primary repulsive from an
| aesthetic point of view. It's just bad database design.
|
| Still, I feel for you. My primary concern, though, was
| that it made life more complicated for me. But email
| adresses were separate from ERP user names, and we did
| not have two employees with the same name, so
| first.last@company.com was good enough for our purposes.
| mbg721 wrote:
| "Wait a minute... _my_ dad 's name is Leo Varadkar
| too...Mom!?!?!?"
| arethuza wrote:
| In the part of Scotland I come from there was a distinct lack
| of variation in surnames - so much so that people would use
| so-called "tee-names" to identify different families
|
| e.g. My ancestor David Wood had the family tee-name "King":
|
| http://www.pirieonline.uk/history/PFWv1-o/p1444.htm
| maxwell wrote:
| Sounds like another (anecdotal) data point for nominative
| determinism:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180404-do-our-names-p...
| krylon wrote:
| Those are two people from a group of at least several
| hundred. I'm not sure that's strong evidence. I count it as
| one those weird coincidences that make life interesting.
|
| Of course, they might be a lot more insurance agents with my
| surname, but I wouldn't know one way or the other. Also, I
| like weird coincidences, so I'm rather biased.
|
| That doesn't mean you're wrong, though. I just don't have
| enough data to support your idea.
| [deleted]
| asimpletune wrote:
| Wow, I have a very uncommon Italian surname, and I was super
| surprised to see the results. The majority of my relatives were
| concentrated in where I know them to be, with a few outliers in
| the north and south.
| utopcell wrote:
| This site is misleading, tricking you into entering your name on
| an ad. Also one of the individual country's input fields triggers
| Chrome's CC popup.
| mywittyname wrote:
| This is the impression that I got.
|
| I don't see any means of seeing names without actually entering
| anything. If the site was intended to be used for educational
| purposes, it would at least show a list of common names by
| default.
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| Nice.
|
| Also the bloat-free implementation. Why can't all websites be
| like this?
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Also the bloat-free implementation._
|
| Only if you have a blocker that deals with the interstitial
| ads...
| mazr wrote:
| Oh yeah ! Onomastics (the study of names) is very cool ! And a
| nice data point to add to personalized data. I did a project with
| that a while ago to study discrimination in France
| (https://namograph.antonomase.fr/) and it worked pretty well as
| long as you have large samples and stick to distributions
| comparisons.
|
| Some nice use w.r.t. social mobility : https://www.amazon.fr/Son-
| Also-Rises-Surnames-Mobility-ebook...
|
| A good API to work with : https://namsor.app/
| pelasaco wrote:
| Portugal isn't Europe?
| locallost wrote:
| It would be interesting to see it on the EU level and for other
| countries (I understand finding the data is the hard part).
| There's been a lot of migration and millions of people live
| outside of their countries.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I'd like to see this as a coloured heatmap, normalized to the
| proportion of people in an area with a given surname...
|
| Currently it's just highlighting big cities for any surname I
| could think of.
| busyant wrote:
| I've come across this one for Italy:
| https://www.italianames.com/italian-last-names-maps
|
| It has regional heat maps, but I prefer the one provided by
| surnamemap.eu It seems more granular and more comprehensive (my
| mother's maiden name is rare and it shows up on surnamemap.eu,
| but does not on the site that I linked to).
|
| I've actually used the surnamemap.eu site for maaaybe 10+
| years. However, I don't know if it's updated, and if so, how
| frequently it's updated.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| What I find rather depressing about these kinds of things is that
| they will be utterly useless to learn anything from going forward
| in just a few more generations, after the atrocity of forced
| integration and so called "diversity" will permanently and
| irrevocably muddle and pollute all cultures and people and
| societies all throughout the world.
|
| We will soon no longer need to fight over ethnicity and race,
| because we will all be the same muddled and meaningless mass
| where the Ministry of Truth tells us that today the Italians are
| equally Indians, as Nigerians are Swedes.
|
| The process is already quite advanced in the USA, where unique
| cultures, dialects, histories, cuisine, traditions, etc. that
| existed until rather recently, have been utterly shattered and
| deracinated and polluted through homogenization and
| corporatization of society, not to mention both sent into the
| memory hole and been rewritten a few times by now.
|
| To see an even more extreme example of what the outcome of all
| this "globalization" and fraudulent "diversity" will be is to
| look to the ancestors of blacks in America that have suffering
| from the effects of being captured in war in Africa, sold into
| slavery, mixed together and torn apart socially, and shipped
| across an ocean where they were then traded and mixed and muddled
| wantonly just like "diversity" intends to do. They suffer from an
| acute absence and intentional destruction of what little culture
| and society they had. That is what the oligarchs of today have in
| store for all of us regular folks just like the oligarch
| plantation owners of the past perpetrated on humanity.
|
| And don't make the mistake if you think "white people" deserve
| the atrocity of "diversity" that has targeted them up to this
| point, it will invariably come for you and your culture and your
| society too, only there will be no one left and no moral argument
| to defend your culture then.
| asavadatti wrote:
| This has been happening since the dawn of civilization. Why are
| you so upset about it happening now?
| vehemenz wrote:
| Why are you so attached to recent history? Populations and
| cultures have always been in flux throughout Africa, Europe,
| and Asia.
|
| Nearly every language and religion that have ever existed are
| now extinct. You don't get Italians, Indians, or Nigerians
| unless that happens in the first place.
|
| Here are some more facts that might melt your mind:
|
| - Until very recently, there were no Spanish speakers in the
| Americas.
|
| - Ancient "European" admixtures have been found in modern-day
| China.
|
| - 50,000 years ago, the inhabitants of the British Isles had
| dark skin and light hair like Melanesians.
| vermooten wrote:
| zzzzzzz
| boredumb wrote:
| You are expressing a forbidden truth quite well. The marketing
| power behind this agenda does an incredible job of scrubbing
| away any of the ill effects of globalization paired with an
| obvious effort to discredit and obfuscate any coherent
| arguments against it.
| lvxferre wrote:
| I've looked both of my surnames, as they're fairly regional in
| Europe. Seems accurate.
| Zobat wrote:
| Anyone else found a surname with just 1 "place"?
|
| Started looking av UK and tried a few I could think of. I'm from
| Sweden so I went for the obvious ones like Smith, Black, White
| and then just for laughs continued with colors (oops, that was UK
| so colours, i suppose). Went with Red, Blue and so on, was
| surprised by how many Pinks there were but then hit "gold" (1861
| places) with Magenta, one place!
| SamBam wrote:
| A SurnameMapWhack.
|
| I found mine own, by having a relatively-uncommon US last name,
| and then being born in a European country where no one else has
| that name.
| sjmm1989 wrote:
| Poland for me. 1 result, almost smack dab in the middle.
|
| Romania has none. The rest all seem to have some in them. Some
| more than others.
|
| UK though. lol... map turn red.
|
| Edit: I'm in Canada for context.
| nimajneb wrote:
| My wifes maiden name is unique, several generations ago (early
| 1900s or so) her ancestors took their German surname and added
| a French La to the beginning. Won't show up on any of these
| maps becuase they we are in the US.
| sjmm1989 wrote:
| Simple fix is simple then? Remove the La and just use the
| original surname.
|
| I've had to do something similar of sorts in tracking my
| family tree in the past. Long story short is this: Last names
| change, but bloodlines don't.
| baud147258 wrote:
| My mother's maiden appear in one place, which is the correct
| location for her, even if there's still a few living relatives
| elsewhere in France with the same name.
| neonnoodle wrote:
| This map is ""fun"" if your family/ancestry was affected by the
| Holocaust. I am of German ancestry, with one branch being
| Catholic and another branch Jewish. The Catholic surname is still
| abundant right in the region of origin, the Jewish surname(s)
| are, well, let's just say they're not there.
| zepolen wrote:
| Neither is Hitler.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| You'd have to check Austria.
| benlumen wrote:
| Maybe it's my surname, but it just looks like a population map.
| kibwen wrote:
| For common surnames, yes. Mine is quite rare, and while there
| are naturally a few hits in Berlin, most are concentrated in
| Southwest Germany, specifically Stuttgart. But you're right
| that it would be interesting to see the data normalized to
| population.
| odiroot wrote:
| My name is so rare, in my own country, I only get two small
| spots.
|
| And I don't live (or haven't lived) in any of them.
| theomega wrote:
| Related XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1138/
|
| As the numbers are absolute, these maps are basically influenced
| by population densities.
| dhosek wrote:
| The ad at the top looks too much like part of the site.
| Bayart wrote:
| It seems accurate, albeit a bit outdated, for my extremelly rare
| familly name (I know most of the people who bear it, and we're
| still clustering around what I assume is our ancestral village),
| but the more common form of the same name is not in the database.
| funcDropShadow wrote:
| I concur, my surname exists only twice in Germany. And this map
| shows the place where I live and where I used to live. The
| place where my mother lives is not on the map. I guess the map
| is rather detailed. I'd like to know where the data is from.
| eridan2 wrote:
| The Italian site (which is the original project) says:
| Surname maps have been obtained by processing data from
| telephone directories in the 1990s
| IanDrake wrote:
| cpp_frog wrote:
| Pretty accurate, at least for the 15 or so surnames I searched.
| All branches of my family, except one, come from Spain. I
| rearched most of the surnames and was able to get information on
| many (Basque, Castillian, Cantabric) and those roots are still
| reflected on this map. By that I mean they are most dense where
| they originated (some even 700 years ago), indepedent if they're
| toponymic or not.
| davidw wrote:
| Searching for "Smith" in Italy turns up NATO base areas along
| with larger cities.
|
| It's really interesting to see how regional some names are.
| ChildOfEru wrote:
| Very fun; my grandfather came from the Isle of Jersey. The
| surname clusters around the Normandy area which makes sense.
| tompagenet2 wrote:
| Is this normalised at all? It always seems to look like a map of
| where cities are, although there are some interesting trends,
| especially if you pick surnames that have more recently become
| prevalent in a country.
| archi42 wrote:
| Doesn't seem like it is, and the sibling xkcd is spot on. For
| rare surnames it's still possible to see trends, especially if
| you know the high-density areas. I tried some random surnames
| for Germany, and while Klein ("Small") is pretty popular, the
| Latin variant Minor has some obvious hotspot:
| https://www.kartezumnamen.eu/en/index.php?sur=minor
|
| Also, TIL: "Ficken" (=to f...k) seems to be a (rare) surname in
| the northern parts of Lower Saxony.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| My surname is Polish, sort of, and it's typically more
| associated with what was historically northeast Poland/Vilnius.
|
| If you search my surname (Sielicki) you can see how there was a
| resettlement between the lands lost on the east and gained in
| the west after WWII.
| pwg wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1138/
| asveikau wrote:
| Might vary a lot based on the country and the name chosen.
|
| Eg. Italy has only been a single state since the 1860s, and
| regional languages can surface a lot of differences. I entered
| my mom's southern Italian maiden name and got pretty high
| correlation to places where her dad's family had ties...
| aasasd wrote:
| Presumably not normalized--but I still can see the trends, e.g.
| of top two surnames in Ireland, one is more popular in south
| and the other in north.
| [deleted]
| karlerss wrote:
| Basically just population maps - https://xkcd.com/1138/
| kuboble wrote:
| Not at all. For example here is a picture comparing mine and my
| wife's surnames.
| https://i.gyazo.com/f67aae30e098a5f9d1e13fdf58f638e4.png
| DaedPsyker wrote:
| In my case not, I have a pretty rare last name. The map does
| show it's heavily regional with just a few scatterings
| elsewhere.
| wink wrote:
| For (very) common names, yes. Checked mine and a few other rare
| ones on the German map and it 100% matches the few people I
| know of, or the region where they hail from.
| gpvos wrote:
| Even for very common Dutch surnames like Jansen, Smit and De
| Vries you see interesting differences.
| Someone wrote:
| For the Netherlands,
| https://www.cbgfamilienamen.nl/nfb/index.php?taal=eng/ is a
| better source. It has an (IMO) better visualization and can
| compensate for population density. Invalshoek expect it to
| have better data.
|
| (And for first names, there's
| https://www.meertens.knaw.nl/nvb/english)
| gpvos wrote:
| Ah yes, I wanted to link to the Meertens Familienamenbank
| too, which apparently has been taken over by the CBG
| several years ago.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| Nice. A bit out of date, though. I can find myself in there (I
| have a quite uncommon surname), but I haven't been to my home
| country in half a decade.
| nimajneb wrote:
| I thought my last name was a variation of an English last name.
| But apparently there's ~15000 hits on the map for my last name
| and only ~1000 for the name I thought was original spelling. I
| think this is to blame with a very famous musician having the
| other spelling.
| marcodiego wrote:
| For some reason it is lacking Portugal:
| https://www.mapadesobrenomes.com/en/
| cataphract wrote:
| Portugal is such an homogeneous country that this is basically
| a map of population density x national frequency of the
| surname. Only exception I found is Viegas, which has a higher
| than expected concentration in Algarve.
| eridan2 wrote:
| Spanish site has a link to the Portuguese one -
| https://www.mapadeapellidos.eu/en/ - list of countries under
| the map
| coward123 wrote:
| Here's what I thought was really great about this: My family
| originated in a European country not included in the list. In the
| 1600s (maybe even late 1500s) we took refuge in one of these
| countries that allowed a degree of religious tolerance in a
| specific area. Over the next century, many picked up and came to
| the new world.
|
| Anyway, point being it was really neat to see my family name
| still in that very specific area, despite it being a name that
| would automatically stand out even today as "not from around
| here."
| donatj wrote:
| I wish I could search the whole thing at once. My surname is
| pretty rare in general.
| lakkal wrote:
| Neat. I just recently found an old letter pertaining to my great-
| great-grandfather selling a house in Germany prior to coming to
| the US in the 1880s or so. The town mentioned is the site of a
| cluster of his (uncommon) surname.
| sjmm1989 wrote:
| Lol. If I put my last name into UK's map, the map basically turns
| red.
| elaus wrote:
| Very interesting, especially for less popular or more regional
| names.
|
| Would love to know more about how it's done: What is the source
| of those mapping between names and geo locations? Public phone
| books to get the address and then some reverse geo-coding?
| mazr wrote:
| Here's some of the sources I've seen when working on that topic
| [1] : Census data, Phone books, Academic bibliographic
| databases (web of science, pubmed), list of athletes at olympic
| games, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, ...
|
| [1] https://antonomase.fr/fi/mazieres_bms_names.pdf you'll find
| the references to some of these examples.
| gitowiec wrote:
| Exactly! How come it knows where I live?
| tsujp wrote:
| Census data would be one way, e.g. (one of many) for the UK.
|
| https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-
| research/...
| [deleted]
| wiz21c wrote:
| How did they geolocate the surnames ? Mine is pretty unique in my
| country and it's located in the town where I live. Where did they
| got this information from ?
| Someone wrote:
| They say it's from old phone books
| (https://www.surnamemap.eu/belgium/info.php. Seems to be the
| same for other countries)
| elcapitan wrote:
| Interesting, for Germany they don't quote any sources. My
| guess is that it's from the old D-Info CD-ROMS which used to
| be quite popular for a while. Obviously they wouldn't mention
| scraping that data.
| rory wrote:
| My name is common enough that it's basically this:
| https://xkcd.com/1138/
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I don't know which dataset you're using for the Netherlands, but
| it's way off:
|
| https://www.surnamemap.eu/netherlands/index.php?sur=van+der+...
|
| https://www.cbgfamilienamen.nl/nfb/detail_naam.php?gba_lcnaa...
|
| EDIT: actually, it works if I use "vd Zwan", which is fine by
| itself, but that contradicts the instructions on top of the page:
|
| https://www.surnamemap.eu/netherlands/nl/index.php?sur=vd+zw...
| gpvos wrote:
| Yes, the handling of prefixes is really bad.
| skrebbel wrote:
| maybe your entire extended family went to the efteling when
| they sampled that data
| melenaboija wrote:
| It is sad that most, if not all, of the databases don't take into
| account accents and other phonetic signs. My last name is
| completely different with and without and accent. Actually in my
| case different languages, without accent is a Spanish last name
| and with the accent is Catalan.
|
| That means that people like me have to keep record of our real
| names.
|
| Also curious that databases have been one step backwards, in
| Spain Catholic churches kept record of all the babies born in
| their towns with correct spelling and that is lost now with
| modern technologies.
| fnordian_slip wrote:
| That is indeed sad. I, on the other hand, was pleasantly
| surprised that the site makes a distinction between "ss" and
| "ss".
|
| This usually presents a problem online, and I've sometimes
| considered changing my last name because of that. I had never
| thought about the fact that this must be even harder for French
| and Spanish speakers, with the high amount of accents compared
| to Umlauts and the "sharp s" in German.
| eb0la wrote:
| They still keep that records. During the spanish civil war they
| had better data than the goverment.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Tons of surnames were truncated or spelled phonetically over
| the years because not everyone wants to hand hold an
| immigration official through the proper spelling of a name that
| they can't pronounce and may have characters that aren't in the
| alphabet they're using. Even if you don't say "screw it, good
| enough" after the first few syllables you can lose resolution
| because there can be multiple character combos that generate
| the same sound in the source language but there may be fewer
| used for that in the destination language.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > ... in Spain Catholic churches kept record of all the babies
| born in their towns with correct spelling and that is lost now
| with modern technologies.
|
| I found this to be the opposite.
|
| My church record contains a hispanicized version of my name,
| whereas the government has the proper one. Reason given was
| that the church wouldn't admit certain regional spellings.
|
| Also, acute accents have been recorded in the census databases
| since forever, at least in Spain.
| [deleted]
| busyant wrote:
| Would be cool if this were merged into a single map of Europe
| with a single search. You could get a sense of your "surname
| diaspora."
| runxel wrote:
| It works quite well, but bear in mind that the dataset must be
| already quite old. Based on my ancestors extremely rare name
| (only family in Germany) I would say at least 15 years old - but
| accurate for that matter!
| eridan2 wrote:
| The data sets are the phonebooks from the 1990s - see
| https://www.kartezumnamen.eu/info.php
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| It have some much more up to date info in the UK - it
| definitely has data from the last 5 years as I can see:
|
| * my last 3 houses * my sisters uni locations (quite
| distinctive due to the campus location) * my family home * my
| dads home (post-divorce)
|
| Our surname is uncommon and I know for a fact I'm the only one
| in my county, my dad in his, and my sister was the only one
| ever at her uni. Of course there _could_ be others I don 't
| know in these towns, but when we are talking <30 locations
| total and I know people at each of them and my immediate family
| accounts for nearly a third of locations...
| ulzeraj wrote:
| Where is this data coming from? I have a rare Italian surname and
| this finder puts a very small circle (1-5) on the very region my
| grand grand father departed to America in 1895.
| jonenst wrote:
| This website is overloaded with adds. It almost feels like a
| scam. Based on the fact that almost all other comments are not
| talking about it, I guess at least one of the following
| hypotheses is true (if not all of them): - most people here use
| an efficient addblocker - The website changed since its first
| appearance on the first page (maximize revenue?) - some comments
| are sponsored - on mobile it feels overwhelming but on desktops
| it's more bearable
| rootbear wrote:
| I gave up as soon as I realized that the form at the top was an
| ad and not part of the page. What a mess!
| jason-phillips wrote:
| Brave browser ftw
| toyg wrote:
| _> - most people here use an efficient addblocker_
|
| Yup. I was like, "this is a very oldschool site, super-
| essential, bare styling..." I guess all that whitespace is
| covered in ads for you, lol.
| wsinks wrote:
| ha! I don't use an adblocker, and when I first loaded this
| page, it looked great! and then I quickly quit out and came
| to the comments instead of using it. And then I saw this, and
| went back...
|
| Oh. I just wasn't on the page long enough to see just how
| many ads were loaded, wow!!
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| You make not using an adblocker seem like an active choice
| - can I ask why?
| pooper wrote:
| I flagged this submission and recommend this post be deleted
| and the submitter penalized.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Is there a rule about not posting submissions with ads? If
| so, most news sites would likely be heavily penalized.
|
| In other words, what rules exactly do you think this post
| violated, and why should the submitter be penalized? For
| posting a site with ads?
| utopcell wrote:
| same here
| freeflight wrote:
| This made me curious, so I reloaded the site without uBlock
| origin, and for the most part looks the same; There is one ad
| at the top, one at the bottom, and a cookie info style ad
| banner scrolling with the page, 3 ads in total.
|
| That's a rather humane amount and the only one that's really
| intrusive is the one all the way on the top, the scrolling
| banner can even be minimized to remove it, which leaves a total
| of 2 ads on the site, at least for me on Chrome.
| zdragnar wrote:
| On android chrome, I'm seeing 9 distinct ads just on the
| front page. Inner pages (specific countries) don't have quite
| so many.
| freeflight wrote:
| Wow, that's a lot! Where are those extra ads located?
|
| Gave it a try on my iPhone's Safari; The same 3 ads like on
| desktop Chrome, but there's two extra ones all the way at
| the bottom of the page.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| This is the same for me. I only get the top and bottom banner
| ads that I was used to seeing 10+ years ago. Still too big,
| but they don't make the site unusable.
| Nashooo wrote:
| It also tried to autocomplete CC data.. Feels like a scam.
| nickcw wrote:
| It did that for me too. I can't see why though when looking
| at the HTML. <form name="Cerca"
| method="get" action="index.php"> <input type="text"
| name="sur" size="8"> <input type="submit" name="s"
| value="Search"> </form>
|
| Maybe it is a bug in Chrome.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > overloaded with adds
|
| Overloaded? There's two ads per page, and occasionally one when
| I click a map, and they're not even in the way.
| sjmm1989 wrote:
| I've accepted that the internet wants my data and have been
| using Brave for a few years now. Seems like a fair compromise,
| and their adblocking is pretty decent, even if I get to put up
| with their little pop ups now and then for BAT tokens.
|
| I have it set to maximum ad rate, and just ignore them mostly.
| They are sort of intrusive, but also not really. Depends on
| what you are doing. I've had them pop up in the middle of
| working on some word file or excel sheet; but I also get my
| discord notifications the same way as well...
|
| They don't interrupt gameplay though... usually? Depends on if
| you have a browser open while playing something in windowed
| mode I think. At that point you might get one or two popping
| through due to the browser being open. That sort of thing.
|
| Again, seems like a fair compromise to me. People onboard with
| BAT get paid one way or the other, and I get to deal with less
| ads overall. (Seriously, it's a chasm of epic proportions the
| comparison between before and after.)
|
| Youtube works fine, most websites work fine, and if ever one
| doesn't want to play nice; you either find something else or
| just turn off Brave shield temporarily. I've had to do this
| from time to time with banking for instance, since it was
| blocking something related to the banks log in process. lol. So
| yeah, it's not perfect by any means. But it's a far cry better
| than the others so far in my opinion.
|
| And for those who may want to reply with something about how X
| browser is worse or better than Brave; that's nice but honestly
| at this point I don't really care anymore. I have Firefox on
| standby for those few situations where chromium based browsers
| just don't want to work, and guess what, that's basically all
| of them now; Brave included.
|
| So far, this combo has fared me pretty well. If I could get
| something that does what Brave does even better without the
| crypto stuff included, I probably would use it instead. But
| that's probably going to end up being a heavily modified
| version of Firefox or Chromium somehow; and thus my earlier
| point about being 'good enough'.
| temp0826 wrote:
| There aren't enough tokens in the world to make me accept
| what you describe about brave. Always surprised when I read
| HNers actually using it. It just sounds really scummy what
| they do to me.
| sjmm1989 wrote:
| failedengineer wrote:
| That top ad, the one with the "search for names" text boxes
| that sure looks like you're entering info for your website
| that actually redirects you to another search website...
| yeah, that one is particularly pernicious.
| sjmm1989 wrote:
| Never seen that one yet? That seems new to me. But yeah I
| suppose it would annoy some people.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I haven't seen any ad. Thanks adblockers!
| mlatu wrote:
| > overloaded
|
| ?
|
| got curious enough to turn off my adblocker: i was presented
| with TWO ads on desktop
|
| i think you overloaded the term overloaded.
|
| though they are huge on mobile.. and appear to be subleased or
| something. also there appears to be another ad element below
| the "(C)" line on mobile which is missing on desktop
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| There also seems to be a modal ad on hover out. Hadn't seen
| that used before for ads.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Strangely, I see no ads, and I don't use any ad blockers. Maybe
| it only shows ads to people in certain regions?
| [deleted]
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