Friday, April 20, 2007

WhitePages.com adds a name search tool

Leland Meitzler at Everton Publishers's Genealogy Blog informs us that there is a name frequency calculator at http://names.whitepages.com/.

This is pretty cool - you can input a surname and see a state map with the frequency of the surname by state, get a list of the top 5 states, and a rank of the surname in the entire country.

For instance, Seaver is #8,065 out of over 6 million surnames with 1,052 entries in their database. Massachusetts leads with 92 entries, and California is second with 77.

You can click on an alpha list to see the number of people with a given name - for instance, there are 4 Randy's, 3 Randall's and 2 Randell's in the database.

In order to see the state lists for a given surname, you have to click the "People Search" tab at the top and enter the surname and the state. Clicking on the state and entering the surname in the "Search the People Information database" box doesn't get a list for some reason. When I do this, it says that there are 133 California entries for Seaver, not 77. My guess is that they include spouse names also, and work phone numbers too.

The top 10 surnames in the USA, according to WhitePages listings, are:

1. Smith
2. Johnson
3. Williams
4. Brown
5. Jones
6. Miller
7. Davis
8. Anderson
9. Wilson
10. Taylor

In California, the 10 most common surnames are:

1. Garcia
2. Hernandez
3. Lopez
4. Smith
5. Martinez
6. Rodriguez
7. Gonzalez
8. Johnson
9. Lee
10. Ramirez

That's interesting! There are also listings for first name frequency by state or for the entire country. Canadian provinces are included in these listings.

Thanks, Leland, for the tip and the link.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

JLt2ei The best blog you have!