Names really can tell us a lot about a person!

Me with Diahan Southard, March 2023

I’ve written before about names earlier this year because my great-grandfather was a baby left “on the wheel” in Villa San Giovanni in the 1870s and just randomly given a name. (See Names and Naturalization, February 7, 2023) This week’s blog is about a new-to-me resource that I think is pretty cool and even non-family historians might think so too!

The Sawtooth Slayer

In March, as part of the Rootstech Conference, YourDNA Guide Diahan Southard hosted the first-ever DNA Dining Detectives Murder Mystery Experience, and I was one of the lucky ones to go! It was an awesome and interesting night of teaming up using DNA genetic genealogy techniques to solve a mystery. The mystery was based on the book by Nathan Dylan Goodwin called The Sawtooth Slayer. As part of the evening, we received a copy of Diahan Southard’s YourDNA Guide book (definitely worth it for those tough DNA brick walls) and also Nathan’s book.

I just finished the book and although I knew “who did it”, it was still a fun read. What I didn’t expect was to learn about a new very fun resource in the process!

Finding a Name

Have you ever wondered what the most common surname is in the world? This is easy enough…just ask Google, Siri, Alexa, or your favorite device….Wang! Have you ever wondered about how common your own surname is? Or maybe where all of the people in the world live with your surname? In The Sawtooth Slayer this idea was used to investigate the possible historical origins of a particular surname. And Nathan provided a website to investigate this and I tried it out!

https://forebears.io/

This past week I have been doing a lot of research on my Mayflower line and was curious about the Walker line. Here’s some of the fun things you can learn about a surname (or a forename), in this case Walker:

1. It is the 543rd most common surname

2. There are approximately 997, 243 people in the world with that name

3. 

   Location for Walkers

   What the distribution of those names look like (see map)

4. Origin stories of the name…most agree that Walker comes from the occupation a walker or fuller or cloth maker

5. The average height of people with that name–64 inches for a Walker woman

6. Sometimes the average income with people with that name

7. And other random facts.

Location for Orcutts

The other line I worked on this week was Orcutt. What do you think..more common or less? Yeah, that is probably pretty easy. It is the 73, 237th most common surname and about 6,724 people have Orcutt as their last name, with a different distribution. It appears to be named for “a dweller inside a hillside, or riverbank, or cottage”.

What’s my last name (which is my husband’s name) Breyfogle look like?

It is the 452,272nd most common name, with approximately 750 people holding that name, and guess where they are?

Breyfogle's

Pretty funny, eh? Of the 750 people with the name Breyfogle, 728 live in the US.

I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that people often falter over saying my name, it’s not like you might run across a whole lot of us.