There I was, bored to distraction, when I innocently put my family name into google. At best, I expected a few newspaper articles about my brother’s military honours and some genealogical stuff.
Imagine my surpise when I found that there’s a system of caves in Greece thought to have been inhabited during Neolithic times which bear the family name, and a town in Papua New Guinea bears it also.
Now, of course, I’m curious about how these places came to bear the family name.
Oh yeah, the family name is “Dirou”, so those of you who’ve been to Greece may know something about the history of the cave system.
Has anyone else discovered totally unexpected stuff like this when googling?
I own the domain of my family name. So, as one might expect, my own domain name comes up early in a search.
My family name is not uncommon in the U.K., but pretty uncommon here. So, I see a lot of U.K. references.
The thing that has astonished me is how my name has come up. Or someone with the same name as me. (I usually go by my first and middle initials.) Freaks me out. One nice thing I saw - I have written a “Portrait Art Tutorial” (what can I say, I like to write web pages.) Apparently some people have gotten something out of it. I found a web site of a lady who was ill for a while, and while she was recovering, used the Internet to help educate herself on drawing portraits. She cited my tutorial site as one of her influences. Her drawings looked pretty good, too!
That was a really freaky (but good) feeling, to discover that woman’s web site.
I found that there’s a respected scientist at NASA called Joe Gurman.
And there’s a restaurant in the Czech Republic called the Gurmán Restaurant.
I have a feeling that my surname (Gurman, as you guessed by now) is derived from a word similar in meaning to the French Gourmand (glutton), which, when you consider my user name (which I chose because I do love food) is a pretty good case of Nominative Determinism
My family name-dot-com belongs to an Austrian company that sells high-tech scales and other measuring equipment. There’s also a “Hotel-Pension” of that name in a place called Tamsweg in Austria, and a German family of the same name renting out a vacation home in Lower Saxony, up by the North Sea. Oh, and some sort of lake resort in Austria. (My German really bites so I’m relying on Google’s rather nasty and useless translations.) Plus a number of people - some students, some authors (a number of them probably dead!), and one cardiologist whose name turns up again and again.
I thought my name was exceptionally rare - seems it’s just uncommon, there just weren’t many who came to the US. Instead they stayed in the Old Country and started fleecing tourists
I’ve done that a couple of times. No one owns the family dot com name, but I found a lot of things anyway. There are quite a few writers and artists in my family, so it actually brings up a lot of pages with their work.
Gah! The first of 326 searches is a Canadian with my last name who lost a major court appeal on ‘search & seizure’ (several hours after arrest, ‘illegal’ search of the car produced several kilos of marijuana and cocaine).
On the American side, my last name is the author of many dissertations on diseases, lipoproteins or mushrooms.
I have a unique last name. It brings up either me, my brother, or some distant cousins I don’t really know.
However, because my name is Maori and it actually has a definition, it was also the title of a popular book, so most often it brings up dissertations or references to this particular tome. Which is a shame because I found the book to be horrendously dull.
Since my married name is West, I wasn’t going to try that, but my maiden name is unusual in this country. Apparently there are two professors who share my name who’ve written a LOT!! I also found my brother - he was mentioned in the WSJ when he was hired as CFO by his current employer. Over 1000 hits overall…
Let’s see I’ve found a fish restaraunt in Amsterdam that shares my last name, a heavy metal band in Sweden, a crap load of stuff on Lucius Verus, and some stuff on Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Other than that there isn’t too much coming up although I’m not going to look over the 157,000 different hits to see what they all are. And as you may have guessed Lucius is my last name. Oh yeah and some realtor lady in Colorado owns the dot com of my family name.
I’ve typed in my full name, and I could not believe how many Vinnie Virginslayers are out there!
But seriously, Ladies and Germs . . .
If you want to measure your personal Q rating, type in your full name into Google. The number of times you come up in the first few pages should give you an idea if you are happening or not!
I’ve done it. It seems that I am a Caribbean born soccer player for West Ham. Go figure. I’m also related to some lady named Helga, who was famous for painting watercolors of plants. If there’s some family money, I’ll investigate this…
Yup. Although it’s not a common name either in the US or France, it’s the name of a major French chemical company, and half the name of a major French-Italian candy company, who also owns the website with my family name.
I’ve also found a chef in France with the same first and last name as my father.
I’ve done this before. the family name yields a few personal websites (at least one moderately famous person, who I knew about before), a publisher, and…an archeological site in Scotland. Lots and lots of genealogical stuff.
Mr. Lestrange’s name seems to just turn up personal sites, some of them in German. My mom’s maiden name doesn’t turn up much interesting, my step-dad’s name turns up his obit.
Now, first name with last name reveals that I am, apparently, claims manager for a life insurance company. I myself do turn up in the minutes of Sacred Harp singings for various years.
My family name’s dot.com is some consulting firm out in Santa Clara. I thought at one point there was a firstname-lastname.com out there with my name on it but I can’t seem to find it. My name is common enough that simply putting that into Google gives me 707,000 hits - plenty associated with a certain type of box; first+last gives me 1200, of which the first is about a murder case in Mississippi in 1948. It apparently is fictional (I always wondered if there was a real Yoknapatawhpa County) but finding that the accused murderer and his father shared my and my father’s names was a little disconcerting.
The first real person to share my name on this list works at the Marine Physical Laboratory of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UCSD.
