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Tuesday, March 25, 2014

SATURDAY NIGHT GENEALOGY FUN: TOP FIVE SURNAMES

I'm a bit behind this week on my blog posts, among which is my response to the
latest Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver over at Genea-Musings:

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 how many surnames are in your database and, if possible, which Surname has the most entries.  If this excites you, tell us which surnames are in the top 5!  Or 10!!  Or 20!!!

4)  Write about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, in a status or comment on Facebook, or in Google Plus Stream post.


Like Randy I used the Surname Statistics List report on RootsMagic 6. You'll notice that the
three names out of the first four are all variations of the Ellingwood name:

Ellingwood                     964  from 1658 to 2012
Ellinwood                       613  from 1692 to 2012
Dunham                          371   from 1588 to 2009
Ellenwood                      257  from  1748 to 2013
Abbott                             174  from 1587  to 2005 

The three variants of Ellingwood reflect my adding the information from two out of print
Ellingwood genealogy books to my family tree. I recently started concentrating on my
Dunham line which increased that name.

I have a total of 3081 surnames on a database of 30572 people. All these figures are from
the RootsMagic6 databas on my computer. They are probably higher on my Ancestry.com
tree, but I won't know until a do my semi-annual download from Ancestry to the RootsMagic database. 

Incidentally, my West surname only has 143 entries. Darn that John Cutter West brick wall! 

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