There is someone with the same first name, same last name (both of British origin, both relatively rare in Australia), and the same middle initial, living in my area of Sydney (say 6 suburbs in a city of 5 million).
I first found out about him when I stopped off at a supermarket on the way home from work and heard my name being paged. I wondered who knew I’d be there…it turned out he was the store manager. On separate occasions I’ve randomly met his wife and son (we worked out who we were when introduced), but not him.
The freaky thing, I rented a house for a year, and 5 years later, he bought it.
Both my first and last names are fairly common. So I’m not surprised that there are lots of matches.
What did surprise me is that once I got my degree and joined the provincial professional organization there were three of us active in Ontario … I make sure to include my full middle name on my resumé.
My given name is quite common. There were four of us with that name in my grade school class of about 28 students. Really common.
But my family name is highly unusual. I have only once ever randomly met a non-relative who shares my family name.
Yet the power of Google tells me there are about six or so others with whom I share first and last names. One is a real estate agent. Another in insurance IIRC. Both have websites and show up quite a bit on Google searches for our shared name.
More surprising to me (and to him) one of the doctors with our local health service is Mylastname Myfirstname Hislastname. I have known of a very few others in the Caribbean who have as a first name what I have for a last name including one elected politician on another island who makes the radio news report with some regularity. And the most famous of those was a well known musician of a particular Caribbean genre.
I’ve never met anyone with my name and it’s not particularly common, but google tells me I share it with a professional golfer, an attorney in Rhode Island and a British professor. I had never heard of the golfer but she rates a lot of hits and a Wikipedia page. Also a taxi dispatcher from Vegas that died recently.
I’m sure there’s more but those are the top hits. I didn’t find myself in the first few pages
When I was a kid, I thought our family name was unique, that we were the last of the family line. Turns out that was far from true, there are many people with our last name, they just lived so far away and are so distantly related that they’re basically entirely separate from us.
Anyways, there was a cousin I was named for. He was someone of some importance in his field, so when you Google my name, there is a significant sports prize posthumously named in his honour that comes up a lot too.
Wondering what people (okay, women) would see if they checked me out online, I googled myself and the first page of hits were all for a guy who made cheap pornos fifty years ago.
Luckily, there’s a sustainable environmentalist who’s been publishing papers recently, and climbing up the charts.
Oh, yeah, I suppose I could accomplish something myself… but i’d rather just cheer on Good Digs as he pases up Icky Digs.
There were many more, but they all died in tragic “falling over the edge of the quarry” accidents.
I tried that site, too, and got “2 people with your name in the US”. I know three others within 100 miles…
Yes. While my last name is longish, Polish, and strikes many Americans as unusual, there are quite a few folk with the same name. When my folks visited Poland, they said there were several pages in the phone book.
There is a guy in the same area as me (Chicago-ish), who has my same first name, middle initial, last name. In fact, he and I share the same licensed profession, and at one point went to the same allergist. Never met him.
Also, I’m something like the 5th or 6th in my family with the exact same name. Pretty uncreative bunch.
The first site says there are 400 people in the US with my first and last name, another 80 in the UK per second site. There might be a comparable number in Ireland despite its much smaller population, and some more in the other English speaking countries. There’s one other in my ~50k person city in the US, there used to be two.
The How Many of Me site says I’m the only one with the FN/LN combo but there are some 187 with my last name. This is kind of surprising actually as only my brother and his two sons share it in our family. The name was Swedish but got kind of crunched coming through Ellis Island. The other family we knew about were Jewish; I don’t know if their name arrived intact or not.
When the internet was starting up I got a few emails (including one from Israel) if I knew so-and-so <Lastname>. "Naw, I’m the Scandahoovian <Lastname> from Minnesota; you want the Jewish <Lastnames> from Baltimore. Doing a Google search gets a number of hits around the Baltimore including a prominent MD but a more general search comes up with a number of hits in the UK. Perhaps some of them emigrated here relieving the Baltimore bunch from being really fecund.
There are two other people with my name registered at my local pharmacy. I’ve never met either of them — other than being given their medication by mistake, which I don’t count as a formal introduction.
There must be dozens of others, I’m sure, but the only other one I definitely know of is a school teacher near Bath. I’ve never interacted with him either, though I have had email conversations with his friends, family, coworkers, pupils and on-line shopping accounts. He likes pine furniture, model trains, and giving people the wrong email address.
I work in retail and am always amused by people who, when I enter their name into our national database, are shocked to discover there are 6 other people with their “unusual” name in just our store’s database alone…sometimes someone living on the other side of town. Even my fairly uncommon maiden name and less-popular spelling of my first name (only 20,000 with that last name, according to the site cited above) generates lots of hits on Facebook, Google, etc.
I got that, too, but I know it’s wrong. When we first moved to our lil corner of nowhere I answered the phone and someone asked for me by name. It was a bill collector for someone who shares my name, her husband has almost the same name as mine (Alec and Alex, for example) and lived about a mile from us (I checked the phone book). The husband might have been a cousin of Mistermage’s or not (3 families came here with that last name, 2 related and 1 not as far as we can tell unless it was many, many generations back in the Old Country.)
Nope. Last name Finnish, first name a not overly common but standard English language first name.
As far as a quick Google search tells me, i am the only one with this particular combo.
