I always wanted to know which states had lots of people with my last name. I just didn’t know it till I found this link. There are few of my kind anywhere, except there’s a cluster in Maine, which is completely expected. There’s also a cluster in Oregon, which doesn’t surprise me in the least cause I already knew about that branch.
French names cluster in New England and Louisana. Scandanavian names cluster up in the Dakotas and Wisconsin and Minnesota. Cool stuff. (Via gtexts.)
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That’s pretty cool, even if I don’t have one of the 50,000 most common last names in the United States.
It’s interesting – some names of French origin are particular to the northeast (Chagnon and Charest are fairly striking examples), while some are much more localized to Louisiana (Boudreaux is an obvious pick, although they seem to have been spreading out a bit) and of course some are about even in the two regions (Moreau, for example).
I couldn’t think of a good resource for common names of French origin, so I picked two bad ones: The Senate of France and The Legislature of Quebec. Interesting, but not surprising, is the fact that the majority (99 of 119) of the Quebec list is represented in the U.S., but the majority (209 of 302) of the France list is not. (Those are rough figures – some names got mangled when I was trying to process them, probably more on the France side than the Quebec side. This data should not be used as a substitute for professional diagnosis and treatment.)
Hm, interesting. I assume you’re aware that there’s a significant Franco-American population in New Hampshire and Maine, which trickles down into Massachusetts and Vermont as well. It’s Quebec’s fault. Louisana’s French influence, on the other hand, comes directly from the mother country.