Randy’s Saturday night fun challenge involves going to Public Profiler and checking the distribution of one’s surname.
When I checked my current surname,Spindle, that of my husband, I got the results I expected:
The concentrations of this surname are in Virginia and Texas. Looking closer at Virginia, the deepest concentration is in Essex County, the county where we found my husband’s relatives still living back in the 1980s.
Only slightly behind Virginia is Texas, where my husband was born. In fact, his great-great grandfather, born in Virginia right before the Civil War, came to Texas after the War, and populated the state with 12 children. He died and is buried in New Mexico. Others branches of the Spindle family also came to Texas and so this distribution is pretty much as I expected.
I wanted to investigate the prevalence of this surname in Germany as I suspect that the surname originated there–my husband’s immigrant ancestor came as a person sentenced to transportation in 1732 from the Old Bailey in London. I was not able to get the Germany distribution to come up–perhaps not enough persons there with the surname. But after the US, the United Kingdom was the next country. The US was only 2.06 per million, and the UK was even less at .11 per million.
I then decided to check my own surname, Osborne. It’s a more common name. My line, as far back as I can trace, originated in North Carolina, migrated to Tennessee and then to Texas.
But it’s down the list according to frequency per million–Australia is first, then the UK, New Zealand and Canada. The US is fifth with over 270 per million. And Kentucky is the state with the highest concentration. Which is interesting to me as I know of none of my fairly profilic Osborne line being in Kentucky.
But you can see that far more widely distributed and more prevalent than Spindle. Not unexpected. Usually, if I meet someone named Spindle, we’re related. Named Osborne, not so much. Osborne is a much more international name, though I still suspect it may have originated in the British Isles somewhere.
All in all, a fun exercise. It’s always interesting to see who lives where and how it matches your own research. I’ve had several inquiries re: Osborne from Australia–this explains it.
