[blam]

I have a British name but it's not on the list.

[blam]

Ping.

[BullDog108]

Me too.

[fhayek]

Heh heh, heh heh, he said 'Glasscock', heh heh.

[Fiji Hill]

...people from Cornwall to Wyoming in the 1860s

A lot of Cornishmen came to California as well and could be found in mining towns such as Calico, now a ghost town near Barstow. They were known as "Cousin Jacks" because they all seemed to be related, and a good many were named Jack.

[IronJack]

This would provide an interesting adjunct to geneology research, I would think. It would also be interesting to postulate on why the migrations went where they did. I can understand the Cornish going to Wyoming; Cornish were miners and there were a lot of hard-rock mines in Wyoming. But I'm not sure what there is about Mississippi that would have attracted so many Scots.

The Upper Midwest is largely populated by Germans and Scandinavians, mostly because the climate is similar to their homelands, and because so many of them were farmers and land was free for the homesteading in the latter 19th century.

I'm sure there are other ethnic pockets around the country that can tie their existence to some historical event. Large parts of the Dakotas, for example, are peopled by refugee Germans who had immigrated to South Russia under Catherine and were exempted from military service. Later, during the wars of empire that wracked Europe in the 19th century, the Czars reneged on their agreement and began to conscript these displaced Germans. They fled wholesale and tended to stick together in the New World.

[ladyinred]

It isn't Cock is it?

[Doe Eyes]

In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire hurricanes hardly ever happen.

[timer]

400 years ago(1588) : the battle of the spanish armada : England wrested control of the oceans from the spanish, portuguese, dutch, french(re-proven at trafalger, nelson's victory-in-death). Thus all the coasts of the world became british trade zones, the english language naturally followed. Thus ENGLISH is the world's language because of that long ago naval battle...it's a variation of the golden rule. In this case it was ownership of the oceans as the "gold" and he who owns the gold makes the rules...did you know the Union Jack is part of the Hawaiian State Flag?

[Straight Vermonter]

Try playing with possible spellings. My mother's maiden name shows up with an alternate spelling.

[goodnesswins]

So do I....and their are pages and pages of people in the phone book with my name in Vancouver, BC......(I lived there for awhile). It's such a basic name I thought for sure it would be on one of those lists....

[stands2reason]

So true about Yorkshire. Husband (and therefore I as well) has a verrry British name, almost unheard of in the US.

But go to the West Riding of Yorkshire, you can't throw a brick without hitting someone with that name.

A great tool for genealogy.... Bookmarking it. Thank you so much Blam!!

[Torie]

Here is a distribution of my surname, in 1881. It appears that the family gossip the ancestor that the ancestor with the surname came from Wales is questionable. More likely the chap was a coal miner in Newcastle, which is reason enough to cross the pond, albeit it was done more like 1750 (when we find an ancestor with a fishing patent from the crown off the shore and in the estuaries of Virgina), prior presumably to major coal mining, but whatever.

[Leroy S. Mort]

There were 3,211 Cocks in Britain in 1881 — when most were centred around Truro — but only 826 in 1996

Now THAT'S shrinkage....

[SunkenCiv]

Not to pile on or anything, but I think the Cock surname was shortened sometime in the past.

[SunkenCiv]

Personally, I'm still childishly amused by foreign surnames which are hilarious in English. I'd post some Asian ones, but I don't wanna get banned again. ;')