The Popularity of Your Last Name

The U.S. Census Bureau counts the number of Americans every ten years. The same government agency also asks a lot of questions of those people, such as how many bathrooms are in their house and whether or not the family owns a computer. The Census Bureau even counts how many people have the same first or last names.

The twenty most common surnames in America in the 1990 census were:

1. Smith       
2. Johnson 
3. Williams 
4. Jones
5. Brown
6. Davis
7. Miller
8. Wilson
9. Moore
10. Taylor
11. Anderson
12. Thomas
13. Jackson
14. White
15. Harris
16. Martin
17. Thompson
18. Garcia
19. Martinez
20. Robinson

I wonder what it would be like researching the Aalderink family. That name is the last one on the Census Department's list as the 88,799th most popular surname in the country. I am sure there are some other names that are so rare as to not even make the list at all. I doubt if you will find many people named Aalderink in the various records but, if you do find one, that person probably is related to all the rest of them!

I found that my last name is the 1,661st most common family name in the United States. You can see how popular your family name is at: http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names with the full list available at http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/dist.all.last. The same site also shows the popularity of given names.

Comments

[Matt]

A few years back I made a neat little site that combines your first and last name rank into a combined overall ranking. http://misbach.org/census/

[Bob]

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I wonder what it would be like researching the Aalderink family. That name is the last one on the Census Department's list as the 88,799th most popular surname in the country.
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A couple of comments. First, I doubt that you can conclude from the list that Aalderink is the "88,799th most popular" name. The list appears to be sorted by its second column (%freq) and in reverse alphabetic order within that value. So, unless the name frequencies behave in that manner, one can only conclude that Aalderink is one of the many with that lowest frequency.

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I am sure there are some other names that are so rare as to not even make the list at all. I doubt if you will find many people named Aalderink in the various records but, if you do find one, that person probably is related to all the rest of them!
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This may be the case or may well not be. It is not clear how that list was derived. My surname is Emnett and that name does not appear on the list. Nevertheless there are two distinct families with that surname in the U.S. To date, even though we are believe they are connected, we have not been able to prove this. Further, I am VERY surprised that surname does not make this list. I do not think I would consider it very rare. My 'branch' had about 15 households with it at the last census and although I do not have a count on the other branch it has always been numerically larger.

[David Ball]

What surprises me is that two Hispanic names made the top twenty. I went to the Ancestry.com 1930 census index and the surnames White, Harris, Martin, and Thompson were 300,000 plus or minus 10%. Robinson was 217,000 and both Garcia and Martinez were 107,000. Just shows how fast demographics can change from an immigration wave.

[richard]

These lists are fun but they DO NOT represent the true name frequency for the total US census.

Be sure to read the 'Methodology' section of the website. There you will discover that the name frequency was based on a search of a specific geographic area ... which is not named on the site, so far as I could see.

All genealogists know that name distribution varies with geography ... the distribution is not smooth ... the way you would spread peanut butter on a sandwich. Instead it is lumpy: a name cluster here and a name cluster there, depending on where our early ancestors settled.

This means some names could be relatively common in one area and could be completely absent in another.

My guess is that the top 5 names probably are accurately represented ... though the actual sequence of these top 5 names for a national survey probably will be different than for any small area.

So have fun with the list, if you like. But don't pay too much attention to it ...