My maiden name is ‘James,’ so a websearch on that is fairly fruitless!
My married name is unusual, though. Because there is an astronaut with the same last name (Buchli), Googling it gives a number of hits. Actually, a little 'net research revealed a traditional story about the origin of the name that nobody in my husband’s family had heard. I found that, rather than being from Germany as we had thought, the family came from Strasbourg – now in the French province of Alsace-Lorraine, but then an independent city. They were French Huguenots originally named Beuhl. When Louis XIV conquered Strasbourg, he sent soldiers to convert the landowners to Catholicism. Beuhl refused, holding up his bible and saying, “I stand on the word of this book and shall flourish like yon evergreen.” Impressed by his piety and courage, the soldiers returned to Louis and told him about it. Louis made Beuhl an officer of his court (complete with a coat of arms – an evergreen tree on an azure background, crossed with the King’s colors) and changed his name to Buchli or “little book.” The Buchli’s left Strasbourg a few years later (after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes) and moved to Stutgart. A few remained in Germany, but most moved on to Switzerland, where a large population of Buchlis still reside. Around 1800, several families moved from Germany to the U.S. Some of them americanized their name, but some didn’t and here we are. My husband was fascinated by this story, as were our children. My in-laws, however, didn’t seem especially moved. Possibly the story was made dull by the fact that I had to define every other term – Huguenots, Louis XIV, Edict of Nantes – hell, they’d never heard of Alsace! Like Buttercup, they aren’t the brightest.
My family name returns 3.4 million hits (it’s one of the ten most common surnames in America).
Even my given name plus family name returns 25K hits, since it’s shared by:
[ul]
[li]a cult music figure from the 1960s, better known in the UK than in the States[/li][li]a current NHL player[/li][li]a Wisconsin state representative[/li][li]a professional boxer[/li][li]a program manager on the Microsoft Office team[/li][li]an administrator in the athletic department of Georgia Tech University[/li][li]a Jimmy Buffet wannabe in the Orlando area[/li][li]a news anchor on the NBC affiliate in the Mobile/Pensacola/Ft. Walton Beach area[/li][li]an overachieving physicist/medical student at U of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign[/li][li]a professional soccer player in the Scottish Premier League[/li][li]an Australian economics professor[/li][li]an education professor at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio (who even has the same middle initial)[/li][li]an Australian expatriate who runs a white-water rafting company in Japan[/li][li]a former Natural Law Party of Maryland candidate for Congress[/li][li]a football player at Kansas Wesleyan University[/li][li]an eye doctor in Miami[/li][li]a character actor who was in High Plains Drifter, Cahill, U.S. Marshall, The Hindenberg, Orca, The Muppet Movie, and many episodes of Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Mission: Impossible, The Streets of San Francisco, and others.[/li][/ul]
But then my name is pretty common; there were, last I checked, over twenty entries for it in the Atlanta phone book.
All I found on Google was entries for my cousins, my dad and me… I did find out that my cousin won a Sports Emmy award this year for his editing work on a program for ESPN on the Heisman Trophy Awards…which was interesting.
Mostly what I come up with are pages related to Thurston County, Washington.
One somewhat disturbing page has to do with a school shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon, in 1998, by 15 year old student Kip Kinkel, who also shot his parents to death the night before.
When I do a search on my full name, I come up with lots of boring crap: A poem titled “Love is Dead”; U of Maryland sports stories involving a college wrestler who shares my name; many, many geneaological pages. (Turns out one of my ancestors was the daughter-in-law of Herman Melville).
I’m moving this to MPSIMS at the request of the OP. Who’s absolutely right, btw.
Apologies for not moving it sooner. No sooner got the 'puter unhinked then went and got my eyes checked; they’re dilated from hell to gone.
Sigh.
Nose prints on the monitor screen, folks.
My last name is very, very rare. There are maybe 40 people total, all of them in the U.S. A Google search will yield a few hundred hits. Well over half of the hits are for my father who is fairly well known in his field, 20 or 30 hits are for me and the rest are spread out amongst another dozen or so folks.
A few years ago I was kind of curious about my geneology and did a DejaNews search on my last name. I thought that it would be fun to find some long, lost relatives. I found a guy who posted to some very strange news groups. Now I’m an open minded guy and am a big believer in the opinion that consenting adults should be allowed to do whatever they choose but this guy was into stuff that was way out there. I am going to try to put this as delicately as possible but if you are squeemish please just skip to the next post. This guy was aroused by used feminine hygiene products. His posting had to do with the best places to find them. That little discovery put an end to my Roots experiment.
That was entertaining, which is what I think I come here for. My surname has been uncommon in my experience - it’s Scandanavian and I have never met one who wasn’t a relative. But there’s obviously some more out there.
My sister googled my name to get my email address and got lots of hits that were all me, but having googled the last name alone at the suggestion of the OP, I didn’t even show up until page 30.
I saw a lot, some of which I knew about; my surname’s associations on the 'net include:
• A Senator and Governor of SD (whom I knew about), who is probably the reason my surname is borne by…
• A Wildlife Preserve
• A country club
• Several roads
• A municipality in MD I just learned about
• I found several academics’, including my father’s, works published or cited
• An energetic Scandanavian musician
• A memorial chapel in Colombus dedicated to my Dad’s first wife (a WASP who died in a plane crash during the war - she died nine years before I was born, but I felt some twinge of emotion - I don’t know why. Weird).
• None of my siblings (at least not up until page 30)
• A MOMS chapter and a women’s tennis team
And too much more to mention, including the anticipated genealogical repositories. Thanks for the OP, reprise.
My last name brought up 1,560 hits. Although there are only 37 white page listings for it in the United States (it’s not even listed in the US Census), it seems a little more common in Sweden, because it brings up a plethora of personal sites, all in Swedish. After wading through 6 pages of hits, I have yet to find a page I can actually read.
First + Last Name
Since my first name is Matthew (which is probably very rarely used in Sweden), this brings up only 56 hits. I see a few pages that mention me, some that mention my family (mostly lists that happen to contain another Matthew on them) and a picture of me I did not know about. Oh, and a page that lists my parents’ salaries. Heh.
Eerie, this coming up now. In fact, I had just done this last week at my Dad’s prompting. I’ve known for quite some time that he and mom, I, and my son are the only ones of us left in the US, not that there were ever many. Quite a few French references, though.
Sightings of interest:
• Apparently, there used to be a manufacturer of firefighting equipment under our name.
• There’s an Us vs. AT&T from a few years ago in NJ (where I grew up). It’s not me or my folks, which leaves my sister, and she’s not talkin’.
• Several links to Bix Beiderbecke fan pages, as Mom’s father played in a band with him back in the 20’s (he was “Doc” Ryker, if anyone’s knowledgeable and/or curious).
• A few historical mentions of past family members, mostly military rolls.
Sadly, I get no place names or anything cool like that. I rather doubt there will ever be a dotcom.
… And how weird is is that “google” has become a transitive verb?
Holy Dinah! 2,150 responses with both first and last name. The first entry actually IS me. Then a little bit further down is part of my family tree - an incredibly detailed one, at that. Then my former job’s website, and a bunch more.
This is creepy. I don’t like having my full name up there.
I share a name with a fairly famous actress, so I turned up several pages of information about her, plus other people with the same first and last name, plus a few things about me as well.
For those who - like me - have a foreign surname and found many of their hits were foreign language sites : you can set google to search only English language sites. This reduced my hits from over 1700 to 250.
Interesting! I just googled my full name (in quotes, as one unit) and got three pages. All but two of the items were of things actually related to me. I was quite surprised. Mailing list postings from 1995… <shudder>
However, googling just my first and last names got weird fast. I apparently have my own evangelistic association, write papers dealing with network fault simulation, sell models, work in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at Berkeley, and run an advertising agency in the UK.
Beyond that, there start to be repeats. And references to the TV show Dawson’s Creek. But the first listing was my home page! Ha!
And if I just google my family name Dawson alone, well…
TV shows, colleges, a mountain and a city in Yukon, a firm of international lawyers, more evangelistic Christian stuff, a maker of wooden blocks, a textile manufacturer, a county in Montana, another county in Georgia, a power company in Nebraska, a spring company in Kentucky, a computer company in Calgary, a cast mamber on Star Trek: Voyager (you can tell I haven’t watched any Trek for a long time), and on and on…
I frequently do a search (on various search engines) because my father’s company had been absorbed by another company and completely off the map about a year after he retired. He asked if I would do a search and help him remove references to the company I find.
Anyhow, my family name.com is owned by me. I think one of my very distant relatives in Germany owns .net and the variant of .com.de
There is a very prominent graphic designer in Chicago that has written books and I guess a big-whig in the advertising arena in Chicago that is all over the place on the web. I am surprised he didn’t snag our last name.com first but has his own .com with his name in it.
Other people with my last name (pretty unusual) are the following:
A researcher/doctor that did a study on Alexander the Great and some illness. There must be 30+ pages associated with this.
A librarian with a college in Maryland. I actually first met her on AOL when I did a search on AOL for people with my last name.
A high school student with the same first name as me, in volleyball and music.
An attorney that was on Jeapordy back in the early 90s – his name is John.
Another web designer with the family name too.
Lot’s of references to tech related items like ISDN and such but mostly written in German.
There’s more but our name is not common but I was surprised to find a couple thousand pages referencing my last name.
When I got curious and googled my family name, the first site on the list was my family name .org
The site wasn’t for a SD Senator, Firefighting equipment, or a computer company. It’s actually a geneology site for the entire family. It has 8,000 people related to me listed, including myself. I had no idea it even existed.
I’m completely uninterested in geneology, but it was interesting to learn of my great great great great great great great great grandfather, who immigrated to Norfolk, Massachusettes in 1637!
