Where does your SURNAME come from?
Everyone's got a surname, but now a new website which maps names against areas of the country where they are most common helps shed light on where our families come from. Until now it's been 
hard to know what a surname says about someone. But a website has been launched that maps more than 25,000 surnames across Britain, highlighting areas of concentration. Anyone can tap in their name and with the click of a mouse glimpse a profile of how others who share their name are distributed around the country.
Is a facility, free to users, that allows family name enthusiasts to make searches on the geography of the most frequent 25,000 surnames in Britain. These have been classified into regional or cultural groups of origin. Maps show their historic and current distributions in Great Britain and tables their areas of highest density in other parts of the world.
So, for example, while it's no secret that there's a small cluster of Blairs residing at a prestigious address in central London, the surname is most concentrated on the west coast of Scotland, particularly around Argyllshire and Ayrshire.
The site is the result of a year-long study aimed at understanding patterns of regional economic development, population movement and cultural identity, says Professor Paul Longley, who led the project. It maps the distribution of surnames from the 1998 electoral register and does the same against the 1881 census, making it possible to see how surnames moved around the country during the last century. And despite the talk about Britain's increasingly mobile population, the map reveals many surnames still have strong regional ties.
For example, the HALLAM name scores highly in the East Midlands, particularly so in Nottinghamshire (includes parts of Derbyshire-Ilkeston area):
| Statistics about this name – HALLAM: | |
| Great Britain top area (1881) | Nottingham |
| Great Britain top area (1998) | Nottingham |
| Great Britain to area index | 1074 |
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Statistics about the name – HALLAM
| 1881 | 1998 | Change | |
| Frequency | 5583 | 7574 | + 1991 |
| Rank Order | 788 | 790 | – 2 |
| Occurrences per million names | 206 | 203 | – 3 |
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It can also give you details of the Social Demographics for your name:
Category of surname English …………………………… – Regional; East Midlands
Mosaic type with highest index………………………….. – Industrial Grit
Index of top Mosaic type…………………………………. – 166
% of people with a more rural name…………………… – 6
% of people with a more high-status name………….. – 77
Cultural, Ethnic, Linguistic categories of surname……. – British
Love the "Industrial Grit" catergory! 
Industrial Grit contains owners of older, comfortable but unpretentious houses, often in ex-mining areas, who work in manufacturing and assembly plants. Demography People in Industrial Grit live in communities that for generations have relied on mines and manufacturing plants for their employment, and on their own hard work to fund the purchase of the homes they live in. These are self sufficient, family oriented people.
