Map your surname

[postman]

Spot on ,red hot area.Midlands,Derbyshire actually.Grandad from Belper.

 

[the_mikey]

No data for my mother's side, but then again southern Ireland isn't in the UK. Married surname is most prevalent in mid and west Wales which is where I live, although I only moved here 15 years ago. However it isn't or wasn't originally a British name at all.

If I use my mum's surname it's pretty much bang on where I live now in South Gloucestershire..

 

[Toshiba Boy]

I have a fairly unusual surname, and it appeared to be spot in with regards to Birmingham (where vast majority of my family lived/live) and Norwich (which I was aware was a "hotspot" for the name), but also came up with an area just south of Newcastle upon Tyne, new one on me. Very interesting.

 

[Chris S]

My mother's maiden name was 'Swindle' which we always thought was a corruption of 'swin dale'. It seems to be centered around Cumbria and North Yorkshire so there might be something in it.

 

[Chris S]

I've also got relatives called 'Armstrong' which is highest around the Scottish Borders and County Fermanagh. They don't seem to have moved much in the last 400 years.

The Irwins and Montgomerys seem to have stayed put as well.

 

[Effyb4]

It says my married name comes from Carlisle and my maiden name comes from Kingston upon Hull or Lincoln. Both areas are hundreds of miles away from Essex. My Grandmother's maiden name comes from Essex though

 

[jefmcg]

Another no-data here. But apparently everyone with my surname left the village in Northern Ireland during the potato famine, so that's no surprise really. Various Duffs and Corrys and Fogartys all show data, though

 

[Mrs M]

Gloucester and Glasgow

 

[MarquisMatsugae]

Absolutely spot on with mine.
Very high in Dumfies and Galloway.
High in Glasgow.
Very high in the Western Isles

 

[MarquisMatsugae]

Interesting. My surname hotspots in Stoke, and again in Birmingham, my birthplace. It covers the west Midlands and a corridor from the Cotswolds to south Manchester. My mother's maiden name shows no data (Di Talamo) but my cousin's surname , Sproule, shows no mainland coverage, but a distinct hotspot in north west Ireland.

Not Adrian Sproule is it ?

 

[srw]

West Country - yes
But it shows the real hotspot as Dumfries & Galloway which is utter and complete tosh. My family spent a lot of time researching the origins of our surname, which in its current iteration is an American invention, but dates back a man in the area of what is now the village of Flixton in N. Yorks being granted the name by William the Conqueror in recognition of loyal service. Whether that man was local/native or a Norman granted lands there (as well as the name) is not known. But we have no Scottish history whatsoever and the name as far as we have been able to determine (phone directories etc) simply does not exist in Scotland. So phhhtt to that!

"all you do is enter your surname and the website maps where in the UK there is an unusually high number of people with that surname living."

It's just reporting data - not history. And annoyingly I can't find out what data it's reporting. I assume it's relatively recent electoral roll data, because that's a data set that's easily available. There's another site here: http://gbnames.publicprofiler.org/default.aspx from the same stable which is less sexy but more useful. It shows data from 1881 and 1998. Oddly, the new site's heatmap for my name is more like the 1881 map than the 1998 map. And oddly both show a hotspot around the Somerset town my father has retired to rather than the Lincolnshire village which nearly shares its name with us and whose graveyard is full of people with the same name as us.

 

[ShipHill]

Stoke-on-Trent which is exactly as I suspected knowing my dad's side of the family history quite well.

 

[Cubist]

Not Adrian Sproule is it ?

No, not Adrian.

 

[kapelmuur]

Problem with these distributions is that the data does not give the sample size, so the areas with the 'most' could be 10 people or 10,000.

My dad's family came to England from Kilkenny in 1847 and settled in Shrewsbury. They worked on the railways and quickly spread around the UK and the US/Australia. I understand that the biggest concentration of my surname (Campion) is still County Kilkenny.

However, I've found people called Campion in Shrewsbury in the mid 17th century and wonder whether my economic immigrant ancestors were returning home. No way to prove it though.

 

[Globalti]

This is far more interesting: http://maps.cdrc.ac.uk/#/geodemographics/oac11/default/BTTTFTT/11/-2.2498/53.4977/

In the sample I've linked, see the band of Cosmopolitans that spreads south from Manchester University out to Cheshire.