Cousin Bait Wins Again!

I have been working on re-doing my family tree as part of the 2016 Genealogy Do-Over and in the past week I entered the Baptism records of 29 children that were born between 1820 and 1834 in the tiny village of Oberselters, Hessen-Nassau, Germany.  The six families involved were Burbach (3 brothers) Muller ( I don't know yet if the Mullers were related) and  Pabst families.

Susanna Burbach had moved to Wurges after her marriage to Johann Georg Meurer and her children were Baptized in Wurges.  Susanna's daughter Anna Maria Meurer married Andreas Hassler and they remained in the area.

This week ancestry.com sent me an email that someone had posted a message on my account.  The message was from Patrik Hassler in Germany!  Patrik wrote that Susanna Burbach Meurer was his 3rd Great-grandmother and he still lived in the area.  He found my tree on ancestry.com and was looking for family in the United States.  My 2nd Great-grandfather Hubert was a brother of Susanna Burbach!! Another cousin found. Whoot!!

Saturday Night Genealogy - Surname Summary

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - How Many Surnames?

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!): 

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, in a status or comment on Facebook, or in Google Plus Stream post.

I used Family Tree Maker 2012 for this exercise,  I went to publish, Charts & Reports, Person Reports, and finally to Surname Report. 

My  surname count for my family history file is 857 surnames.  The top ten, along with their oldest and newest dates are:

Name                    Count                    Male                      Female                 Earliest                 Most Recent

Ferguson             132                         73                           59                           1641                       1946

Sempsrott           118                         71                           47                           1694                       1966

Meurer               110                         51                           59                           1786                       1946

Burbach              95                           41                           54                           1713                       1940

Hansen                84                           49                           35                           1829                       2008

Coan                   70                           45                           25                           1793                       1971      

Hassler               69                           46                           23                           1815                       1939

Wolf                   56                           32                           24                           1843                       1931

Brahm                 44                           21                           23                           1828                       1949

Fleming               44                           24                           20                           1846                       1932      

Peterson             39                           28                           11                           1851                       1989

Fuegerson          38                           18                           19                           1748                       1861  

    

Clearly the surnames of Ferguson and Fuegerson can be combined so the combination would be

Ferguson/           170                         91                           68                           1641                       1946

Fuegerson

This would leave room for the twelfth entry to be:

Connery               37                           16                           20                           1826                       1943      

The total number in my file with the surmane Unknown is:

Unknown            31                           6                              25                           1690                       1895

Looking at the most recent dates shows that I definitely need more cousin contacts.