Researching Common Surnames

I was recently contacted by an individual wanting to sponsor research on their family with a surname of Miller. I’ve done a fair amount of planning and research on common surnames and thought I’d write about how finding the right information for a family with a very common surname requires different research methods.

First of all, you have to establish that the surname your performing research on is a common surname. Names like Smith, O’Brien and Miller are definitely common. You might go to your favorite search engine and search for “most common surnames” which will give you a variety of web sites which convey the most common surnames.

I use another quick method. I just surf to my favorite genealogical search engine and enter the surname to search one of the U.S. Federal census. Almost any year will do, but for the purpose of esstablishing surname commonness, I like to start with 1880. If you get like two million results from your search, you most likely have a common surname, and then my friend.. the rules change. Let’s say the family you’re looking for is one Abraham Miller who has a wife who’s name is Mary. Doing a search for this family can easily result in hundreds of resultant families with the exact same given names.

When you have a surname that is not common, it’s fairly easy to find your target family. One can fairly quickly identify the correct family using the normal mthods – looking at the children’s name, their ages, the location they’re living in, the parents ages and birth locations and so on.. However, when you have a very common surname, one must look additionally at middle names, the street and address the family lives at, the occupation, where the parents of the individuals were born as well as other factors based on what is known of the ancestor your searching for.

I like to create a table, and then take all the candidates who are close matches and evaluate each based on what we actually know about the indivduals in the family. If we know the birth year, then that becomes an attribute. If we know the occupation that becomes an attirbute. Once you have all the attributes for evaluting each record, you simply place a checkmark into each attribute that is true. You can also use a number. While there can be exceptions, the record having the most checkmarks or the highest numeric score is generally the best fit.

Once you get a “best fit” family for a given census year, the next step is to search another census to find the same family. What you’re trying to deterime is when the family arrived in the area they’re living in and how long they remianed there. Once you can do that, you can then take a look at other records to help validate that your target family is indeed the family you’re looking for. Other records, might include newspapers, city directories, voter registrations, probate records and so on. Also, the longer a family is in a particular area, the more likely they are to be written up in the local newspaper or in a book detailing the history of the county.

I hope this helps you with you search. You’ll need to take more time and dig deeper to successfully research a family with a common surname in order to validate continually that the records you’re looking at are indeed for the family you’re interested in.