The Project
Surname Map is a project born in Italy in 2015 and pursues the following purpose: to satisfy people's curiosity about the distribution of their surname in Italy. Subsequently, the project was extended to other countries, such as Spain, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and so on The surname has an important historical significance and represents the belonging to a family creating a link between us and our ancestors. For this reason it becomes important to understand how much our surname is widespread, where it is more concentrated, to identify the presence of several stocks or, on the contrary, to discover its rarity. This information helps us to better understand a word that in fact is assigned to us at our birth, accompanies us throughout life and will be handed down to our children.
Data sources
We created Netherlands surname maps by processing over 6 million data, obtained with an immense and precise collection work from the old telephone directories of the beginning of the century. For this reason our maps are not updated and do not include information about users who haven't owned a phone. The advent of mobile telephony in this century reduced the number of fixed telephone users, so we chosen to not use recent data to count on a larger database of users. Moreover, the main purpose of our project is to allow people to explore the origins of their surname and the use of old source data is the best choice to accomplish our goal.| Tweet |