Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - How Many Surnames?

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings issued a challenge

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

1) Go into your Genealogy Management Program (GMP; either software on your computer, or an online family tree) and figure out how to Count how many surnames you have in your family tree database.

2) Tell us which GMP you're using and how you did this task.

3) Tell us how many surnames are in your database and, if possible, which Surname has the most entries. If this excites you, tell us which surnames are in the top 5! Or 10!

4) Write about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, or in a status or comment on Facebook.

I used Roots Magic as Randy did. I began trying to use Family Tree Maker 2009 but was unable to find a way to list by surname only. My report was only 18 pages long but revealed that I have about 809 surnames in my data base of 3066 individuals.

Surname All Male Female Earliest Most recent
FERGUSON 132 73 59 1641 2002
SEMPSROTT 120 71 49 1694 2008
MEURER 110 51 59 1786 2003
BURBACH 94 41 53 1713 1998
HANSEN 83 48 35 1575 2008
COAN 74 49 25 1793 1997
HASSLER 69 46 23 1815 1996
WOLF 56 32 24 1843 2002
FLEMING 44 24 20 1846 1999
BRAHM 44 21 23 1828 1995

I also ran a general data file statistics report. Here it is:

Individual Statistics All Male Female Unknown
Individuals Selected 3066 1595 1467 4
Individuals with marriage event 887 433 454 0
Average age at marriage 24.97 26.69 23.34 NA
Minimum age at marriage 9.00 9.00 13.00 NA
Maximum age at marriage 67.00 67.00 59.58 NA
Individuals with death age 1051 607 442 2
Average age at death 59.79 59.27 60.77 1.00
Minimum age at death 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Maximum age at death 120.00 100.00 120.00 2.00


Individual Statistics All Male Female Unknown
Married Individuals 1899 949 950 0
Average marriages per person 1.08 1.09 1.07 NA
Minimum marriages per person 0.00 0.00 0.00 NA
Maximum marriages per person 4.00 4.00 4.00 NA
Average children per family 1.95 1.94 1.95 NA
Minimum children per family 0.00 0.00 0.00 NA
Maximum children per family 15.00 15.00 15.00 NA

This has been an interesting exercise and a good way to find out the strengths and weaknesses of
the various software programs. Thanks Randy!