Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

It’s Saturday Night – 

time for more Genealogy Fun! 

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible music here) is to:

1) Go into your Genealogy Management Program (GMP; either software on your computer, or an online family tree) and figure out how to Count how many surnames you have in your family tree database.

2)  Tell us which GMP you’re using and how you did this task.

3)  Tell us how many surnames are in your database and, if possible, which Surname has the most entries.  If this excites you, tell us which surnames are in the top 5!  Or 10!!  Or 20!!!

Well, I have to admit that I would likely have not completed this task if Randy Seaver wasn’t using the same software. Thus, I was able to ‘cheat’ off of his post to figure out how to do this.

I am a RootsMagic 8 user. My first attempt at using the Surname Statistics report was with the ‘Surname (Alphabetical)’ setting. If printed, that would produce a 90 page report!

Running the report with the ‘Frequency of Surname’ sorting option still produces the same information in a different order. Leaving out those individuals yet to have a surname added, the following are my top surnames:

• Crawford – 1482
• Ricketts – 921
• Foster – 422
• Briles – 397
• Curry – 336
• Wells – 285
• Thompson – 268
• Hammond – 263
• Mentzer – 203
• Sellers – 195 (Not an ancestral line)
• Smith – 185
• Currey – 181
• Young – 158
• Broyles – 140
• Ralston – 131
• Jones – 126
• Burke – 126
• Rush – 119
• Hutchinson – 118
• Allen – 116
• Christy – 109
• Crandall – 102

Did you notice the similar surnames in the list? Since the name is spelled differently, names like Curry/Currey and Briles/Broyles appear in the list twice. To help identify other names with duplicate spellings, I exported the report to Excel.

This allowed me to see that I have 3577 unique surnames in my list and to sort them alphabetically. Once sorted I can visually browse to list to locate other similarly spelled surnames.

• Andersen / Anderson
• Barnhard / Barnhart
• Barret / Barrett
• Beall / Beals
• Beattie, Beatty / Beaty
• Beckerdike / Beckerdite
• Beer / Beere / Berrs
• etc.

Browsing this alphabetical list also revealed what is likely a misspelling: Crawrford.

Thank you Randy for this challenge to look at our data differently!