Go to Hamrick Software at this link and type in Landry as a name and select “All Years” in the year option.
Observe the maps and how they change over time.
Does your surname, or that of someone else you know, have a really interesting distribution?
Check out Jones, Smith and Robinson.
Interesting…it seems that between 1880 and 1920, all the Smiths living in New Mexico packed up and moved to Oklahoma.
Mine, while I suppose it only shows populations above a certain level, doesn’t accurately depict the westward migration of my family.
My family came to Virginia in 1700, moved to Kentucky around 1800, then Missouri in the 1820s, distributing elsewhere aftere the Civil War.
This shows only Missouri in 1850, Missouri and Virginia in 1880, Texas in 1920 (?), then a wide distribution in 1990.
Mine comes out fairly accurately. It follows the migration from Virginia down and then westward to Louisiana (where I was born) from the 1800’s to 1920. After that, there is a pretty even dispersal across the country.
It seems that the Steinhardts didn’t arrive with enough numbers to register until 1920. At that point, they only showed up in one state - New York. In the seventy years that followed, most of them packed up and moved to Wisconsin (Wisconsin??) with a smaller number still around in New York and Nevada (Nevada??), Vermont and Connecticut.
Zev (still in New York) Steinhardt
Our database contains the 50,000 most commonly occurring names in the United States. Unfortunately, the name you selected isn’t contained in this database. Try using a slightly different spelling of this name.
Screw that. I know how to spell my name, as did my parents and grandparents.
That may be the case, but there are surnames that have undergone deliberate and unintentional respellings over time. Even “Smith” has seen its share of respellings: Smyth, Smythe, etc.
I know in my own ancestry that some names have undergone changes. I’m not sure whom to blame: government officials taking census data, recorders of deeds, marriage lecenses, death certificates, even semi-literate family members themselves, etc.
The spellings of my own surname, not all that uncommon a name, yield at least five variations that I’m aware of.
Don’t be too alarmed that in your case there may be some of your forbears who flubbed at least one spelling somewhere.
If you’re unhappy with Hamrick’s surname results, you might want to check out this Census Bureau surnames list to see just where the name fits in a frequency distribution. You could also check for respellings if you know of them, or take potshots at potential ones.
Interesting. My swedish-origin, rather uncommon, last name has the expected pockets in the upper Midwest, and for some reason, a strong showing in Utah.
88,799 names representing 90% of the population.
Nope, not there, either.
That’s got to be a real pisser. Did you try some respellings?
Ditto. 
Loopus and kunilou, I’m not asking you to reveal your surnames, but have you counted the number of entries in the phone book where you live? Have you Googled for your surname? Have you used one of the people searches on the web to locate where others with your surname may be located?
If it’s any consolation to you, when I first encountered this Hamrick site, I looked up most of the surnames of people at work. I’d guess that had “no hits” on at least 10 of them. Ninety percent of the population (as noted in the Census Bureau list) still leaves 10% of over 250,000,000, or 25 million people whose names didn’t make the list. Just be happy your surname keeps you off lots of junk mail and misdelivered stuff. 
I decided to go back to the source of my name, and found this page, which appears to do something similar to the link in the OP for names in France. My name is uncommon in the extreme even in the land of its origin. Just over 600 people in France were born with my last name since 1890. That appears to mean that it is somwhat below the 15,000th most common name in France.
That’s a lot better than it did in the US anyway.
I made a slight understatement of the US population in my last post. Just to beat others to the punch, let me say that this Census Bureau site puts it at 296,000,000 and change.
I must have napped through the increase.
Can’t speak for loopus but, yes, I have an extremely unusual surname. Every Google cite is either me or a close relative. A people search reveals only a handful of non-relatives with my surname.
Of course I knew this already, and was just being snarky. But if the Census Bureau can catalog 88,799 names, why not add the last 29.6 million people. I mean, what are my taxes going for, anyway!
And you’d be surprised how much junk and misdirected mail we receive. Not to mention real mail addressed to any of the several dozen misspelling’s I’ve collected throughout my life.
Wow. Sounds terrible. Sorry I brought the subject up. 
Yep, me too. When I use the most common alternate spelling, I get 1 state at the 1 in 1000 level in 1920. My actual last name doesn’t appear at all, and usually doesn’t in things like this.
Pfft - apparently most of my McAncestors were still in Ireland in 1850…all but 4 states dark blue (1/10,000).
The phone book where I live lists my family as the only owners of our name, but we do live in a small area. I can’t get to a physical Houston (closest metro area) phone book at the moment, but WhitePages.com lists one guy in Houston who shares my last name. I don’t think he’s a relative.
Googling my surname yields just over 25,000 hits, which doesn’t seem like very few. Many of hits, however, refer to a state senator who has the name and an airport (hmmm…) that has the name. A lot of them are people I don’t know, though.
A general search at WhitePages.com yields 51 hits (11 non-published). The biggest concentrations appear to be in Texas and Arkansas (these would be my family), Michigan, Florida, and various Southern states.
Just a fairly uncommon name.