Saturday Night Genealogy Fun – How Many Surnames in Your Family Tree?

Time once again for some Saturday Night Genealogy Fun. This week’s topic from Randy Seaver’s Genea-Musings is to figure out how many surnames are in our family trees?

Thankfully, there was no need to count them all by hand on a pedigree chart, as RootsMagic 7 has a surname statistics list that did all the work for me.

I have 1,692 surnames in my family tree. Here are the surnames with the most family members in them and this didn’t really surprise me at all, given that some took a lot of collateral research to piece together, some are families from which I descend 2, 3 or even 4 times and a few are just very common surnames.

  1. Adams – 132 people in the tree
  2. Carlisle – 98
  3. Coleman – 86
  4. Tarbox – 80
  5. Hicks – 78
  6. Bucknam – 72
  7. Molin – 69
  8. Brown – 65
  9. Haskell – 66
  10. Wilson – 64
  11. Scerbak – 62
  12. Burt – 60
  13. Redding – 59
  14. Patorai – 56
  15. Parker – 53
  16. Wheeler – 51 – Tie
  17. Lakin – 51 – Tie
  18. Smith – 50
  19. Pratt – 49
  20. Scripture – 47

My husband’s family tree has slightly more names – 1,749 and there is but a single duplicated surname in the list (Smith)  when compared to my family tree and, no, the Smith families are not related at all.

  1. Williams – 744 people in the tree
  2. Miller – 154
  3. Fritts – 133
  4. Pryor – 130
  5. Nation – 89
  6. Stufflebean – 67
  7. Mahon – 66
  8. Woodruff – 61 – Tie
  9. Spear – 61 – Tie
  10. Brasher – 57
  11. Hudnall – 56
  12. Smith – 54
  13. Nance – 54
  14. Brown – 51
  15. Jones – 50
  16. Davis – 47
  17. Bandy – 46
  18. Sturgell – 45 – Tie
  19. Lewis – 45 – tie
  20. Shoemaker – 42

In my family tree, there are four surnames which I would consider unique in terms of one progenitor – Tarbox, Bucknam and Scripture in colonial America and Patorai in Slovakia.

In my husband’s tree, the only unique name is Stufflebean. All of the Stufflebeans/Stufflebeams are related as far as I can tell.

What surnames are in your family trees?

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