How Many Surnames in Your Family Tree Database Sunday Morning Genealogy Fun

Kris Hocker on 4 Sep 2016

Randy Seaver over at Genea-Musings has a weekly blog meme called Saturday Night Genealogy Fun. I never tune in until Sunday morning, though, so I shifted it a bit. 😉 This week’s challenge is to determine the surname count in your family tree database.

I use Reunion for my genealogy database. There is a menu item under “List” for “Last Names.” It will create a table of all the surnames in the database. According to its tally, I have 4,805 unique last names in the database.

Reunion last names list

Some of those names actually represent alternate spellings—for instance Hocker vs. Hacker, the top two names, or Houdeshell vs. Howdyshell.

It also shows me I need to do some clean-up. When I started researching, I used ––?–– for unknown surnames. As I gained experience, I started using the (___) that is used in genealogy periodicals. Time to go back and fix that…

It also shows the earliest and latest date associated with records for a surname and how many people in the database with the surname are still living. The date fields are a little deceiving. I’m not quite sure what fields that information is from. Obviously, it includes more than just birth and death dates and also includes empty fields.

The top 25 surnames are:

  1. Hocker – 1851 people, starting in 1756
  2. Unknown [combining ––?–– and (___)] – 1536 people, starting about 1601
  3. Hacker – 860 people, starting in 1642
  4. Hoover – 379 people, starting about 1735
  5. Houdeshell – 371 people, starting about 1787
  6. Walker – 347 people, starting about 1747
  7. Wieder – 325 people, starting in 1721
  8. Stober – 284 people, starting in 1626
  9. Weidman – 276 people, starting about 1618
  10. Miller – 261 people, starting in 1775
  11. Howdyshell – 234 people, starting 1760
  12. Landis – 217 people, starting about 1666
  13. Smith – 193 people, starting 1766
  14. Askey – 186 people, starting about 1727
  15. Mulhollan – 152 people, starting about 1752
  16. Zimmerman – 150 people, starting about 1646
  17. Davis – 149 people, starting in 1721
  18. Shirk – 143 people, starting in 1711
  19. Klein – 142 people, starting in 1655
  20. Krauss – 138 people, starting in 1706
  21. Hershey – 134 people, starting about 1696
  22. Haushalter – 124 people, starting about 1620
  23. Mayes – 124 people, starting about 1753
  24. Long – 123 people, starting 1754
  25. Yeakel – 113 people, starting 1659

I’ve italicized my direct lines. Surprisingly, a number of the top 25 surnames in the database are for collateral lines.

How about you? What are your top surnames?