The Geography and Ethnicity of People’s Names
Research on the spatial mobility of the population in Europe has demonstrated that most people don’t move too far away from where they were born, and tend to marry with people born in the same area. This has the obvious effect of maintaining family names “in-situ”. This chapter uses the current geographical distribution of people’s names in Europe and America to uncover historic and contemporary migration flows as well as regions of cultural interaction. The validity of different methods of spatial analysis using geocoded surname frequencies as raw material is justified. The chapter reviews a gallery of examples gathered from different countries and a range of scales, from the continent to a city’s neighbourhood. These maps show that once settled at their destinations, cliques of forenames and surnames have continued to operate following the same socio-cultural patterns described in the previous chapters. As a result, analysing a “destination” country’s contemporary name register over space we can identify not only the settlement pattern of current migrants, but also of historic migrant populations even several generations after they died.