The reason I selected Landry as the name to try first is that it’s almost exclusively a Louisiana name. I forget the names that did the trick when I spent most of a day one time trying to make it happen, but I was able to find some names that were almost unique to places like Maine, South Dakota, Nevada, West Virginia, and so forth. I didn’t anticipate the state so much as thinking the name sounded at least uncommon.
I have yet to locate a name that is exclusively Tennesseean, and I can buy that on the basis that most families moved into the area westward from the Carolinas and Virginia, thus sharing those states for frequency of name. Since Tennessee is landlocked, overland migration would account for most of the movement from outside the state. That is, of course, until the more recent past when economic opportunities in the state, as well as other Southern states, brought more people in from other states than those of the original migrations.
I suspect that by the next decade most states will be more heterogeneous. And I suspect there will be some surnames that become even rarer because of the way that names tend to die out. In the case of my own family, though not necessarily with the name itself, there’s a good chance the name will die out due to males with that name not fathering any male children. I wonder how many names have suffered from this phenomenon.
Can you think of a surname – not your own please – that is unique to a state to the tune of being in the yellow to red range in one and at least light blue to dark blue in all the others?
My maiden name is concentrated entirely and only in Louisiana on that site. No surprise.
In my entire life, I’ve never actually met someone with my (father’s) last name that wasn’t family. But, when I visited Louisiana there were hundreds of listings in the phone book, and even some shops in town named "xxxxx’s flower shop, etc. I was amazed.
I’ve Googled the name several times. 95% of the hits are for people that live in Louisiana, sometimes Texas or other surrounding states.
And since I didn’t give the colors - my maiden name is light green in Louisiana, and dark blue in every other state. And only shows up in 1990.
My father had all girls.
My married name is strong (red) for all years in New Mexico, and branches out all over the map by 1990, although still much more heavily concetrated in California and Texas.
Not surprising; there are people all over the place in Utah with -sen and -son ending names. And lots and lots of blonde-haired, blue-eyed folk…including me!
My surname is ranked something like 22,000th. I would have thought my mother’s maiden name to be ranked higher, but it’s not listed at all.
The only time my surname got out of the blue range was green in Kentucky, though there was a little light blue in Oklahoma. That was expected since most of us settled in Kentucky after trickling through from around the Great Lakes. We’ve been here for nearly three hundred years, but in very small numbers. Prolific as bunnies we are not.
I went a little overboard typing random things into the search box and found out that, apparently, in 1920 about 1 in 1,000 people in New Jersey has the last name “Ass.”
Though I’m a born and bred Kiwi, I do have an American-based surname (mum married an American soldier at the end of World War II and moved to California with him. He died a few years later, but mum never let the name go) – which isn’t on either of the lists. Kind of cool. I’m not only rare here, I’m rare over there, too.
