22 October 2006

Meme

Oh fine. I'll participate in the name meme. Though it's really rather silly from my point of view.

HowManyOfMe.com
LogoThere are:
9,943
people with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?



Now, I hardly think this is fair, as in fact there is only ONE person in the United States with my full name.
But I was intrigued by some additional information that appears on the page. For example, there are 998,357 people in the U.S. with my first name (I assume this is based on Social Security Administration data), and 3,017,684 with my last name--the largest such contingent in the country. I checked other popular names, but at least at present Johnson is still the second most popular, and there are only 2,429,746 of them, barely enough to make a decent baseball team...
The commonality of my name has always been an issue in my life. I decided to see about my other name, the one that really sets me apart. It turned out that there wer 0 people with that surname in the United States. I know this to be incorrect as I correspond with two such people, and they are definitely in the United States and citizens. So I checked into the methodology and lo and behold, this is what it said.
The list of names from the census bureau isn't complete. For privacy reasons, names with relatively few responses were not included in the list. We used this data to create this site. Our site can only be as good as the data we have to work with...The program returns an estimate based on available data. It should be considered a "ballpark figure". It will usually return an answer in the right general area, but the chances of the figure being exactly right are very low.


I thought I'd see where my narrator fit into the grand scheme of things. There are 8 people in the country named Henry Lauderdale, which quite surprises me as only 4,470 people have the surname Lauderdale, which would make Lauderdale very heavy, relatively, on the Henries.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interesting. According to the web site, no one in the United States is named Melinda Granlund. But I am pretty sure I know at least one...

There are 480 Granlunds...

And even more interesting - no one in the US has the first name of Deacon. We picked a winner! :)