Site is a bit slow at the moment, but you supposedly can see where in the world names are most common, and track their development, and other stuff I can't do at moment cos it is too busy.
http://www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames1/
Slow? No
Not working? Yes
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Worst. Link. Posted. Ever!
(I seen it on BBC and it sounded good)
Worked for me this morning, but not a lot of interesting information gleaned, TBH. There's a similar, but better, service at the National Trust site, but is broken down by county.
Tried it again this morning too, but got a database error, just tried it again and the page wasn't found at all.
FarSide, you've made it too popular
Is working for me, right now.
And I would say it's an interesting diversion, too.
Would like to see more info in the results, but that should be of no surprise: I'm a geeky sceptic!
At last, it just worked but the results are weird.
My surname comes from the name of a small village in Southern England.
The text tables seem quite reasonable with three countries being listed, in order as Great Britain, Germany and the USA. The map colours those as light green. Confusingly it also colours Canada, most of Europe, the Scandinavian countries and India the same colour. Most strange is that Argentina is dark blue which the key indicates is the highest frequency.
Am I reading the map incorrectly?
Uh, oh, just tried to run it again with 'Smith' to see the difference but its back to 'database error'.
Still not working, just getting a directory listing now
I think they are still having problems.
I'd like to see the criteria for the name recognition though...
The National Trust one had my surname exclusively in Scotland for the 1891 (?) survey but for the 198ish it was exclusively in the South East.
The Global site put my name across UK, Europe Canada, Africa and a few other places. UK, Europe and Canada I can understand (I'm Canadian born) and it's a geographical feature so most of Europe would have something similar BUT, from talking to a couple of people at work, an analogue to my name denotes 'of royal blood' in a few of the dialects in Ghana. Not related to my heritage, just a fluke of language.
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