Each week on Randy Seaver’s Genea-musings blog he has a post for Saturday night Genealogy fun. Because of the time difference, I have called my series Sunday Afternoon Genealogy Fun. This week’s mission was:
1) Go into your Genealogy Management Program (GMP; either software on your computer, or an online family tree) and figure out how to Count how many surnames you have in your family tree database.
2) Tell us which GMP you’re using and how you did this task.
3) Tell us what the top 20 surnames are in your database and, if possible, how many entries. How many different surnames are in your family tree?
4) Write about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, in a status or comment on a Facebook post.
At the beginning of the year, I started a genealogy do-over, so I only have 1971 individuals in my new tree so far. I use Legacy Family Tree, so I went to the Tools tab, and chose Statistics. I then scrolled down through the statistics to find the ones for surnames.
This only listed the top 10 surnames. Since I also have RootsMagic, I decided to run the report in RootsMagic, and I decided to use my old family tree, which has 11982 individuals in it.
These are the details for the top 20 surnames
DOCWRA 741 persons from 1480 to 2002
MEIKLEJOHN 361 persons from 1670 to 2008
WHIMPEY 308 persons from 1540 to 2009
MARSHALL 172 persons from 1760 to 2002
CAMPKIN 172 persons from 1750 to 1994
SELL 157 persons from1620 to 1934
CLYNE 157 persons from 1751 to 1989
LEETE 147 persons from 1500 to 1975
SLAWSON 140 persons from 1740 to 1984
MARR 133 persons from 1768 to 2010
MULDER 110 persons from 1790 to 1994
OLIVER 108 persons from 1762 to 2011
SMITH 104 persons from 1760 to 2012
HARLEY 104 persons from 1756 to 2004
RUSSELL 103 persons from 1790 to 2009
PRAIN 103 persons from 1673 to 1955
WILLIAMSON 91 persons from 1805 to 1985
MONCUR 88 persons from 1750 to 1965
THEISINGER 84 persons from 1805 to 2004
LAVER 83 persons from 1710 to 1980
To find how many different surnames I have in this tree, I used Legacy.
I have 1974 unique surnames in my old tree.
I have done this before in my posts