Find your name

communicator linked to this site (very busy), which lets you see the geographical spread of your surname across Great Britain recently (1998) and in 1881.

Both my own surname (McCormack) and my mother's maiden name (Towey) are given as Irish Celtic names (no surprise). With McCormack, the geographical spread is fairly much as I'd expected, predominantly in Scotland and the north-west, with pockets of distribution in London and the north-east. (Although nobody from my family was contributing to this distribution in 1881.) I seem to be holding the side up for McCormacks in East Anglia.

With Towey - the maps are very bare! Some pockets in south east Lancashire and Notts. and Staffs., and around Hull in the 1880s (again, nobody from my direct family contributing); and the map in 1998 shows a similar pattern of concentration in Lancashire and southwards, around Manchester and Stoke (my mother was born in Manchester). The Humber Toweys went into a decline. (None of my direct family are contributing to this at all: my mother was one of five sisters, and the rest of her father's family is in the US. Sometimes I think I should change my surname.)

As for my grandmothers, the Kavanaghs (Irish Celtic) follow a similar pattern of Irish distribution (London, north west and north east, Scotland), but concentrated around Liverpool and Cumbria (?!) in the 1880s. Some spread out in the later map - what is going on in Cumbria?! The McGurks (yes, another Irish Celtic name) are not very well distributed in the 1880s: mainly in the north east around Durham and some bits of Scotland. These patterns are strengthened, spreading into the nearby areas by the 1990s, and with some presence in the north west. Again, I don't think there's anyone from my family contributing to the distribution in the 1880s, but I know less about when those branches of my family came here.

I guess it largely bears out what I already knew or could have guessed but - statistics, yay! I got some genealogical software for Christmas, so I'll plug this information into that.