Poll: Do you have a unique real life name? (Anonymous, obviously)

I have a fairly unusual name, both first and last. So when I google myself every result on the first page goes to me personally. But on page two, there’s someone with my name and with a Pinterest account starts taking over.

As far as I know, my full name is globally unique.

I have a rare last name. There are probably fewer than a thousand (mostly in Switzerland) including all variant spellings, but only about 30 with my particular variant (all in the US, of which about 20 are in my extended family). And as far as I know, I’m the only one with the combination of my first name and that last name. And if you include my middle name, I may be the only one ever who has had those three names (my father and grandfather shared my first name but had different middle names).

There one other person in the US with my first name last name combination. My first name is gaining in popularity. My last name is not very common in this country.

Not sure. There are 76 people in the US with the same first last name combo. More than 99.9% of people with my first name are female. Since I’m a guy, odds are I’m the only person in the US with this first name/last name combination.

I think there are like 6 people with my name, as spelled–though it would often be pronounced differently. Both my names have more common spellings that are probably more popular. I even ran into one girl with my name as pronounced, albeit the first name is spelled very differently.

My middle name is just a common name (my dad’s name, actually), but combined with the other two, it makes me unique. Just my middle initial finds only a couple others in the world. All is based on Google, of course.

I guess that’s why I find the idea of giving my real name online to be a bad idea. With just the slightest bit of extra info, you could probably track me down IRL.

My name is quite common in Scotland, somewhat common in the rest of the UK (and probably the US as well) and probably among the top 3 or so most common male names in Ireland.

Googling myself I find I am a firm of estate agents in Glasgow, a British politician, a Guardian journalist, an architect, the recent winner of the Dublin South by-election and I have also directed an episode of the current series of Doctor Who. I got bored after about 15 pages of results - no references to me.

There are only three people with my married last name: me, husband and stepdaughter. The inlaws immigrated from Poland after WWII, and upon naturalization tried to adapt their Polish Jewish name to something more American sounding, with mixed and unique results. There are, however, many people with last names similar-sounding but differently spelled than my married last name.

My maiden last name is quite common, and I’ve known or known of several women with my first-last combination, with a different middle name.

If I google “FirstName LastName” including the quote marks to remove results that only contain one of the two, every.single.result is/is about me. I don’t even need to use my middle name. One positive is that I’m easy to find… But one negative is that I’m easy to find. :expressionless:

I hate when people ask/tell me to add/friend them on Facebook or other places that use your actual name and their name is, like, Kevin Williams or Jessica Roberts or something. Hows about you look for my apparently unique name instead of me finding a needle in a haystack? At least they get it when I ask them to add me instead.

I looked up both my sister and my mother. My sister now has another last name, but it’s about as uncommon, and she has a really unusual first name, so she is the only hit. My mother as well. Neither of them are in the SSA’s top 1,000 first names.

My last name is in the second thousands of common last name. So there are less than 30,000 of us in the US. I’ve got a very common first name, but a not so common middle name.

I had a distant cousin who had the same name as me. I think I was even named after him. He did enough in his field* to be the only other name that comes up when you Google my name, even though I think he died before the Internet; He has a legacy.

*Something I have no relationship with at all, so there’s a sharp line. But not many people would know that.

Fortescue Flowerpot.

My first and middle names are very common. My last name is rather rare, but is a first name for two notables from the Caribbean. When I moved to the islands and told people my full name they frequently assumed my names was LastName FirstName+s.

Goolging my name shows a surprising number of others with whom I share FirstName LastName.

My first name is absolutely unique and unusual. I’ve only known of two other people with the same name, though I haven’t met them personally. One lives here in town and the other I spoke to on the phone 20 years ago at my work. I’m 50, and I’ve lived all over, so that should tell you how uncommon it is. It’s a Greek name. I’m not, but my parents liked the name, I guess. I get a lot of compliments on it, but mostly I just think it’s a pain because people misspell and garble it up constantly. My last name is Spanish and relatively common.

I have two middle names. My second name and surname are both very common, and my first name is fairly common in the UK (although so rare in America that many Americans don’t know how to pronounce it). However, my third name, though not unique, is pretty darned rare. It was actually my paternal grandmother’s maiden name, and is of Welsh or possibly Cornish origin. All her descendants that I know about share it as a middle name. (I have lost touch with 3 cousins, so it is possible they now have children or even grandchildren who share it too.) However, I have only ever come across one person apart from my grandmother, who has it as a surname (and I only found them earlier this year, on the internet). I think it is thus extremely unlikely that anyone shares my exact combination of names. I have occasionally come across people with my firstname-lastname combination, though (mostly authors of scientific articles).

My first name is uncommon in America, but not rare. I’m the only one in my whole family with my exact first name.

My last name is very rare in America and is mainly found in Italy, where it’s fairly uncommon.

My first name–last name combo is unique in all the world. I have a couple of cousins who have a variant form of my first name, but they’re probably using their their married names and so there would be no one else in existence even close to my name. But, counting my two cousins’ maiden names, I put “as spelled my name is unique, but I share a variant with others.” I could have put “my name is utterly unique,” depending on how you look at it.

The combination of my forename and surname is unique within the U.K. but shared with a few Americans, and my full name is globally unique.

Annoyingly, my full name appears to be unique, as far as I can tell, and the way in which my last name is spelled appears to be unique to my family. My first name is shared with several people, but very few in my country. All this makes me stupidly easy to find online. I dislike this.

Legion.

My first name is not unusual but it never makes the list of most popular. My last name does not seem to be that unusual but there are multiple alternate spellings. I have never met anyone with my name. A Google search turns up several that are cluttering up the pages with their accomplishments. I am no where to be found. I share my name with a few doctors and a few published people no one with any sort of fame but enough notoriety to bury anything about me.

When I put my first name surname into Google, even without double quotation marks, the first six or so pages of hits are just me. I’m not on any social media at all, either!