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Surname
Distribution Analysis |
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The UK and US Distribution Analyses were developed because of the existence of the LDS 1881 British Census and the 1880 US Census CDs. I have looked at the 1881 Canadian Census on CD, but the Canadian territorial divisions do not lend themselves to this type of analysis. At the province level they are too large to be meaningful, but at the county level they are too small to be able to plot. However, I am looking at another type of distribution mapping which may be suitable for this approach. Like many others I'm still waiting for the 1901 Census data for England and Wales to come online. While it looks like the information required for distribution mapping are available in the results of a surname search, without having to view the individual entries, a closer examination of the data I have seen so far indicates that there are problems. The main problem is that there seems to have been very little attention paid to data control and no direct indication of the county is reliably given. I am looking at the possibility of building a concordance which maps the civil parish, which is given, to the correct county. However, many researchers have culled national data from other censuses, from BMD records and other sources. These can all be used to create an Aggregated Distribution File that can be uploaded to this facility to plot distributions in the UK or the US. The question arises, "What about other countries?". The answer is that I will consider adding countries. If you have a national collection of data for another country and would like to be able to plot it, please email me at distribution.new@wykes.org and let me know. But be aware that I may ask for data for testing purposes, so please don't request an additional country unless you actually plan to use it. If you have suggestions for improvements to the existing facility, I'd love to hear from you. Email me at distribution.ideas@wykes.org. |