Missed the edit - all of that comes from two hours interview/conversation with a senior Ellis Island historian. (Who I was trying to talk into letting me into the hospital side of the island to shoot the buildings. Didn’t work. But it was a fascinating day.)
I will definitely defer to your expertise on this, but am still left wondering where in the process the change from Cyrillic to English writing came in. The documents we have from my great-grandmother include her identification papers written in Cyrillic, and then nothing until her US immigration papers in English. It’s not a crazily different name – only one letter is different from the more typical way of transliteration.
I’ll throw out my exact example, since I don’t really expect internet anonymity.
My name is Benjamin Thomas Duffy. If you’re looking for an exact first-middle-surname match, I think there are only two of us in the world, and the other is a kid. If you look just for first name-surname, there are dozens of us. If you Google image search “Benjamin Duffy,” I crop up in the first row of pictures. (Amusingly, once you get down below the first few dozen, you start to see covers of books that I’ve either reviewed on Goodreads, or uploaded as a Goodreads librarian.)
I didn’t think about including my middle name. If you throw that in, I’m completely certain I’m the only one in the world.
My expertise is second-hand, but the historian was vehement about the topic - obviously tired of the deeply ingrained assumption that Ellis Island practically invented names for every immigrant. I feel a small obligation to carry his message wherever it’s appropriate.
Transliteration isn’t a perfect science - could have been an error, could have been by someone who had different education.
Immigration papers are often accessible in the original handwritten logs etc. Have you poked around EllisIsland, FamilySearch and Ancestry? You might find her original entry log and some answers.
Pretty goddam unique. Imagine, “Montreal Pontifex” or “Stanislaus Wethammer.” Yes, my real name is right up in that kind of category.
My last name is uncommon enough that when I find someone else who has it I wonder if we’re related. My first name is a common second name in its original form. I’m pretty sure the combination is unique.
But there’s no hiding from Google. Even with my modest level of notoriety most of the hits for just my first name lead back to me.
With regard to my first name, I selected “rare in this country”, but I don’t know if it’s any more common elsewhere. I’ve only heard of one other person with the name, but looking at a few naming sites, it’s considered very rare.
If you’re talking about the entire name (first, middle, last), then I’ve never heard of the middle or last, though the middle exists on naming sites. I wouldn’t be surprised if I were the only one in the world with the combination.
My first name is unique. I know only one other person who spells and pronounces it the same way I do. My last name is fair to middling common. It’s a common word but nor a real common surname.
My user name is my real name, or one of them. The other is “really” unique. The third part is very mundane and most people use that.
I voted not for myself but for my sons. My wife and I both have Swedish ancestors and we decided to use family named from there (as well as my Slavic grandfather) so while not common here, the names are more common in Europe.
My last name is also Swedish and not terribly common here so it makes me and my family pretty easy to find.
Unique enough that I was quite surprised to find a few of me out there.
When it first became popular to google yourself, I googled my name and was surprised to find out that my doppelgänger is a gay porn star. That provided an interesting topic for discussion one day when my wife was googling people she knew.
He’s better looking than me.
There appears to be one person and one street with my full exact name, spelled “correctly,” i.e. the language that matches the surname. If you shift them all to an Italian spelling, you get one person in Brazil.
I have a very common first name.
Last name is very common too (especially in the UK).
The combination is very common too.
As far as I know I am the only one of my first name-last name combo in the US, A google search shows only me.
My last name is not common, my first name is not unusual. I’m kind of surprised there isn’t another person with my name. I would be surprised if there were more than 2 or 3 of us.
Stephen as in Steven, not Steffan. Amazes me how often people get this wrong.
For many years I was unique on Google. Then a few years ago, a single listing showed up for my first name-last name combination in South Africa. And then a year or two ago, someone with my first name married someone with my last name. She always uses the full three-name combo, so there’s no mistaking her for me, but her Facebook page has now taken over the number one Google spot (I’m not on Facebook). I still have spots 2-5, then the South African one, and the rest are mostly me.
The first few images that pop up are all of my father. I don’t think that there is an actual image of me on the Internet.
Just first-last is relatively unique, and when you throw in my middle name and Confirmation name, I’d go with unique. They’re all different national origins, so what are the chances?
I’m pretty sure there is nobody else alive in the US who has my exact first name and last name. My last name is pretty uncommon. There is a cluster of us centered on New England that I’m related to and a cluster in the upper Midwest that is of no known relation. There’s also a German cluster but none has my first name, which is of British origin. There was a guy of the Midwest cluster with my exact first name and last name (but a different middle name) who died in 1997. There may be a guy living in the Midwest with a very similar name, but most of the references I see are misspelled references to the same guy as died in 1997.
Until a handful of years ago I was the only person with my first and last name. But two other women with my first name married men with my last name, so now there are a whole 3 of us in the entire world. There are fewer than 2500 people on earth with my surname, ftr.