Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Top 20 Surnames in Your Family Tree

From Randy over at Genea-Musings:

it's Saturday Night - 

time for more Genealogy Fun!!!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

(1)  Go into your Genealogy Management Program (either software such as Family Tree Maker (in my case!) on your computer or an online family tree) and figure out how to count how many surnames you have in your family tree database.

(2)  Tell us which GMP you're using and how you did this task.

(3)  Tell us what the top 200 surnames are in your database, and, if possible, how many entries for each.  How many different surnames are in your family tree?

(4)  Write about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, in a status or comment on a Facebook post.

NOTE:  If you can't figure how to do this in your GMP (Genealogy Management Program), use the Help button in your program and search for "count surnames" or "surname report" then follow the directions.

Here's mine:

I used Family Tree Maker 2019 because that the software I use for my GMP.  In FTM 2019, go to Publish, then Person Reports, then Surname Report.  You can tweak your report and choose to include either Immediate Family, Extended Family, All Individuals, or choose only those individuals you wish.  Of course, for this exercise, I chose All Individuals.

Then you can choose to sort by surname court (I did.), limit counts to included individuals (I'm not sure how this works.), show divider between surnames (makes it easier to read) and include preparer information.

Then click Generate Report.  I got this:

It looks a lot like Randy's report from RootsMagic 7.  It was easy to do and I have 51 pages of surnames.  It doesn't give me a total number of surnames, but if I do the math like Randy did:  24 names per pages 1-50, plus 20 on page 51 = 1,220 surnames in a database of 14,693 people.  

My top 20 surnames, with earliest and most recent dates they occur:

TAPLEY, count 803, from 1691-2010

MNU (Maiden Name Unknown), count 428, from 1592-1970

Drake, count 269, from 1647-1967

Powell, count 268, from 1715-1980

Bush, count 251, from 1655-1966

Ranney, count 214, from 1661-1951

Claxton, count 197, from 1764-1997

Price, count 197, from 1680-1959

Smith, count 197, from 1738-1984

Hubbard, count 181, from 1601-1913

Goodwin, count 125, from 1776-1947

Durden, count 110, from 1775-1960

Flanders, count 109, from 1756-1970

Kight, count 98, from 1775-1983

Wheeler, count 98, from 1807-2017

Russell, count 94, from 1798-1951

Williams, count 91, from 1777-1979

Odom, count 87, from 1798-1966

Davis, count 86 from 1760-1961

Kea, count 86 from 1810-1957

And one bonus one if you don't want to count the MNU:

Beasley, count 85, from 1791-1972

What surprises me is how few of the top surnames (in numbers) are actually direct line ancestors!