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:
- Smith
- Johnson
- Williams
- Jones
- Brown
- Davis
- Miller
- Wilson
- Moore
- Taylor
- Anderson
- Thomas
- Jackson
- White
- Harris
- Martin
- Thompson
- Garcia
- Martinez
- 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.
