Want to find where people having your last name are found?

“Discover the Origin of Your Last Name” is a web site offering that promises to help you find distribution of names across countries and regions. The site mainly focuses on surnames, because more people with the same surname in a place, means something: either those people are in the region since long ago and the name originates from there or nearby, or members of the same family for some reason relocated there. Want to find where people having your last name are found?

Data from many countries is available, including: Argentina, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and more.

The statistics are very reliable for some countries but not so good for others, primarily because of the quality of public records varies from one country to another. The information about surnames is derived from electoral rolls, birth records, census, and similar publicly-available information. There is good data about: the USA, Canada, and many European countries. However, there is poor to no data about: China, Iran, India and most of the African countries.

The searches are quick and easy. A search for my own surname in the U.S. displays the following results:

2,227 

I had no idea the names was so popular in the United States!

Want to find where people having your last name are found? The “Discover the Origin of Your Last Name” website is mainly used for finding origins of names, curiosity, entertainment and genealogy research. 

You can find this and more at the “Discover the Origin of Your Last Name” web site at: https://lastnames.myheritage.com/.