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.

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.

As part of the research group that created the National Trust Surnames Profiler I have access to a comprehensive database of surnames in Great Britain. Most of my analysis on this database is spatial so I thought I would look at non-spatial way of illustrating the fact that in Britain the majority of people have a rare surname and that there are relatively few “popular”. This distribution is often referred to as having a long tail, as can be seen from the graph below. I find this graph lacks impact and novelty and it is hard to label a meaningful number of names along the x-axis. The surname clouds above have a greater impact by clearly demonstrating the popularity of a few surnames, such as Smith and Jones, in Britain and the large numbers of rarer surnames. I have only included the top 500 names for clarity. Comparisons between 1881 and 2001 are interesting. It would appear that the big names, such as Smith, dominate less now than they once did. The effects of migration also show in 2001 with names such as Patel, Kahn and Singh making an appearance. You can see how your name compares globally here. I am not sure if a word cloud would stand up to peer review for a journal but I think it would make a more interesting addition to presentations and posters than a simple line graph.