I have spent the last few years investigating the geography of family names (also called surnames). I work with the team who assembled the UCL Department of Geography Worldnames Database that contains the names and geographic locations of over 300 million people in nearly 30 countries (a few of these are yet to be added to the website). My research has focussed on the 152 million or so people we have data for in Europe and they all come from publicly available telephone directories or electoral rolls. I also had access to a historical dataset for Great Britain in the form of the 1881 census.  I have tried to answer two questions:

1. Is it possible to approximately establish the origin of a surname based on its modern day geographic distribution?

2. Are particular surnames more likely to be found together and if so do they form distinct geographic regions?

In the past surname research has involved  lot of manual work to create a detailed history of a particular name. With so many surnames in the database I had to think of some automated ways to do this computationally. The patterns I produce are much more generalised than the manual work- I find broad patterns rather than specific genealogical facts- but they provide useful context for population genetics, migration, historical geography and demography. If you want to find out more about this research here are titles for the papers I have had published in academic journals:

The Surname Regions of Great Britain.

Creating a Regional Geography of Great Britain Through the Spatial Analysis of Surnames.

Identifying Spatial Concentrations of Surnames.

People of the British Isles: A Preliminary Analysis of Genotypes and Surnames in a UK Control Population.

Delineating Europe’s Cultural Regions: Population Structure and Surname Clustering.

For a full list see my UCL academic profile. The left map at the top of the post is from the last paper I listed and shows how the surname regions vary across Europe. The map on the right shows how confident I am of the regions based on the number of times they emerge in the cluster analysis.

This week I feature on the 4th Episode of the Global Lab podcast. The podcast is a great new initiative led by Martin and Steve from CASA where they talk about cities, global connectivity and the impact of technology on people’s lives. Episode four features some horrendous physics jokes, Einstein’s Garden at the Green Man festival and a few minutes of me sounding a little underwhelmed about my research. You can listen here.

To have something published in the National Geographic is a great honour. The map of US Surnames has proved hugely popular and was a great project to work on. A real high point in my PhD research so far.

The popularity of a London version of the US Surname Map outstripped all expectations with 10s of thousands of visitors. Cartographically less impressive than the US map but much more detailed, I think the main thing people are most surprised (and perhaps disappointed about) is just how many “Smiths” there are!

I’ve not quite worked out if this map shows anything surprising but I really like the cartography so “Profane Mountains, Polite Plains” gets a shout out here. It shows the frequency of swearwords in people’s Tweets across the US.

This map of scientific collaborations (detailed here) demonstrates nicely the strong academic ties between some countries over others. I think its a great map which I hope (although I can’t seem to confirm) was created with R. The map was actually created using MySQL, Java and Photoshop (thanks @beyondmaps).

Inspired by the What’s in a Surname? map we helped make with the National Geographic, I have created 15 interactive typographic maps to show the most popular surnames across London. What they lack in cartographic brilliance, I hope they make up for in detail. There are 983 geographic units (Middle Super Output Areas) in each map and across all 15 there are 2379 individual surnames (15,000 surname labels in total). The font size for each surname label has been scaled to give an idea of the number of people who have that surname in each place. The surname frequencies come from the 2001 Electoral Roll and won’t contain everyone living in London but it is one of the best datasets available.

London is renowned for being a diverse city but this is barely reflected in the most prevalent surnames- only a few name origins can be discerned from the map. You have to look a little further down the surname rankings for this diversity to become apparent. The surnames shown on all 15 maps can be traced back to one of 38 origins; I have selected unique colours for 10 of the most popular. Surname origins were established using the Onomap classification tool. We are mapping the origins of the surnames, which are not necessarily the same as the origins of the people possessing them. Many people in London have adopted Anglicised surnames.

It is also clear from the maps that the same sorts of surnames tend to cluster together. This is because they often closely reflect the naming preferences of particular groups of people within an area. As you transition through to the less popular surnames things become a little more jumbled and the distinct patterns present in the first map become less distinct.

The final thing that stands out is how surname popularity decreases between the first and second most popular names and every subsequent change after that. You can see this by how quickly the text size reduces until almost all names are written in the smallest font sizes.

The more you study these maps the more interesting, and perhaps complex, they become.  My final thoughts therefore appear a little contradictory. The first is that a surprising number of Londoners share the same name (especially with their immediate neighbours). The second is that despite the dominance of relatively few surnames at the top of the rankings, the further down the rankings you get the more you see of London’s population diversity. We are of course only mapping the top 15 surnames in each area of London- there are many thousands more. If you can’t find your surname on these maps, you can see where it is around the world here.

The maps were created as part of my ongoing PhD research using the Worldnames Database compiled by University College London’s Department of Geography. Thanks to Oliver O’Brien from CASA for putting the maps online. A high resolution print version of the map (previewed below) is available on request.

Map: Mina Liu, Oliver Uberti. Source: James Cheshire, Paul Longley, Pablo Mateos

The typographic map above (click for interactive version) is a collaboration between Oliver Uberti‘s design team at National Geographic Magazine and and my own research with UCL Geography’s Worldnames database. It shows the top 25 surnames in each US State (totaling 181 unique surnames), their frequency and their country of origin. The text associated with the map goes as follows:

“What’s in a Surname? A new view of the United States based on the distribution of common last names shows centuries of history and echoes some of America’s great immigration sagas. To compile this data, geographers at University College London used phone directories to find the predominant surnames in each state. Software then identified the probable provenances of the 181 names that emerged.

Many of these names came from Great Britain, reflecting the long head start the British had over many other settlers. The low diversity of names in parts of the British Isles also had an impact. Williams, for example, was a common name among Welsh immigrants—and is still among the top names in many American states.

But that’s not the only factor. Slaves often took their owners’ names, so about one in five Americans now named Smith are African American. In addition, many newcomers’ names were anglicized to ease assimilation. The map’s scale matters too. “If we did a map of New York like this,” says project member James Cheshire, “the diversity would be phenomenal”—a testament to that city’s role as a once-and-present gateway to America. —A. R. Williams”

You can see the printed map in the February Edition of National Geographic.

For Carto-Nerds: This map has not been adjusted for the underlying population density of Great Britain, which is why it closely resembles a map of urban areas. The underlying spatial units for the density analysis are Output Area centroids which have been roughly standardised for population. Taking the relative frequency of the name therefore makes little difference (I have tried it). There are some more involved ways of accounting for underlying population in density analysis (this forms part of my PhD research) but I haven’t bothered to use them in a map as tongue in cheek as this…

To create this map I used ArcGIS 10 and the Cartogram Geoprocessing Tool. The nice thing about the tool is that it is not dependent on VBA and therefore worked straight off in ArcGIS 10. There are over 220,000 spatial units in this map and the tool had no problems processing them. I have not found any alternatives that work for this volume of data.