This name-mapping link is fun (if you're interested in the UK & Ireland)

Question

Not actually a question, just something cool that I thought others might like, too. This nifty little online tool will map where surnames occur in the UK, color coded by concentration. The name Eddy, for example, is concentrated mostly in Cornwall. My PGM Winter ancestor came from the north side of Devonshire, but the map has that name concentrated in the borderlands north of Newcastle. Entertaining way to while away a little time.

http://named.publicprofiler.org/

(It's perhaps even more interesting if you're familiar with Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer)

Oddly, I'm not finding any Uffords (PGM) at all on the tool, nor the alternative spellings of Uffoot or Uffoott. There is a town in Suffolk called Ufford, and I find various facilities with the name (golf course &c.) Which is to say, the tool has its limits, but it's still fun!

Comments

:) I tried it in the past with some of my more obscure surnames in the family.  Many thanks for sharing the link (pstt I haven't used it in a while).

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I think probably more than half of all 15th-century surnames had died out by 1881, or were too rare to count.

The Uffords were a landed gentry family, and most landed lines ended with heiresses who married into new money.  Often the surname was carried on, without the money, by unrecorded younger sons.  But not always.

And sometimes names mutated beyond recognition.

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I just eliminated the Mulkeys and Yokleys from being from the UK. There was absolutely no data on them in the UK. Perhaps Germany.

Thanks for posting this

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Aha! I KNEW they were from Somerset!

Answer 1

I think this is fun! OH but it ain't going to help one of my surnames much...The Templeton's I descend from were Irish. The DNA has proven it and of course there is a tiny drip of us in Northern Ireland...but Glasgow is awash with us. OY! lol my cousins are going to see this and argue even more about it, oh, family spats! LOL

Mags

Answer 2

New fancy interface!

There's an older interface to the same data at http://gbnames.publicprofiler.org/Surnames.aspx

These maps are the first port of call for English surname origins, because they often give the lie to the just-so stories in the old books.

The people who wrote the old books had no access to any useful data and were basically just making it up.  But a lot of names you might expect to find anywhere turn out to be quite localised in 1881.  This points to a different kind of story, often a single original family.

 

 

Comments

I like looking at geographic distribution of names on findagrave.com, too. It's incomplete, of course, but it still can give you good hints and help identify migration paths.