This week’s #FridayFind is… a surname distribution map!

If you’re not familiar, surname distribution maps help visualize where surnames occurred in a specific time and place. This can be useful if you know your family emigrated from a specific country, but can’t quite pin down a specific region. (And once you do pin down a specific region, you can use an Ortssippenbuch!) However, if you’re researching a more common last name such as Schmidt or Smith, this approach probably won’t be very useful for you.

Also, different resources pull from different sources, meaning not every distribution map will be relevant to your research. For example, the above map by the German Society for Computer Genealogy pulls from a list of Prussian soldiers fallen in WWI. If you’re not interested in German surnames from the early 1900s, this map won’t be very useful for you.

Want to give it a shot? Let us know how it went and send an email to emma@backlog-archivists.com!