‘Putting Your Name on the Map’

Howard Benbrook - 21 Mar 2007 - speaking at the BerksFHS Computer Branch, Woodley

Howard’s interest in the study of names came from the wish to locate the origin of his own surname. He has registered it with the Goons (Guild of One-Name Studies) along with variants Banbrook, Bembrook and Bambrook.

Surnames have four main origins: occupational, geographical, nicknames or family. Occupational names such as Butcher are widely and evenly spread, but some may be locally more important. Geographical names such as Townsend or Castle do not relate to a specific town but others obviously do eg Winchester. Even family based names show regional patterns. A name such as Johnson is likely to be from the north of England or Scotland whereas Johns would more likely to come from the south or Wales.

The ability to plot names on a map could demonstrate many features, particularly distribution clusters. Name variants, such as Clark and Clarke, might have different distributions, suggesting a separate origin. However this is only a pointer to a theory and should not be assumed uncritically.

He then demonstrated the ‘Surname Atlas’ which plots the data from the 1881 census of England, Scotland and Wales as point data or as flood fill map. The base map can be generalised to County level or for more detail the Poor Law Unions can be used. Despite its name, the program can also be used to plot the variation of forenames.

The next program shown was ‘LDS Companion’. This is used to convert data downloaded either from the LDS sites, such as the IGI, or from LDS CD-Roms (you have to extract data from discs as they are in a proprietary format). IGI downloads of Gedcom are limited to 50 records but this program can batch process a sequence into one file. The data can be exported into basic database (DBF) or simple spreadsheet format for use in other programs.

The final program shown was GenMap, this contains a basic UK map linked to a large gazetteer of place names. Data can be imported either from a gedcom file or a database. It will accept data created by LDS Companion and also Custodian; an import wizard is used to assist this process. When the data is imported it is matched against the gazetteer and puts places that are not identified into a separate file for editing. Additional locations can be added to the gazetteer which is accurate to 100 metres. The two main map styles are again Dot-Distribution or Area-Fill. However other options are available such as Poly-Symbol and this uses a library of symbols supplied with the program, although it is also possible to create your own symbols. Within Dot Distribution it is possible to change the size of dot so that it is proportional to the number of occurrences. Sample data within the program includes IGI data for the names Austin/Austen. This can be plotted, using different symbols, on the same map showing that the latter variant is clustered in Kent; (a countrywide map illustrates the effect even more clearly). The author Jane Austen's family came from the Weald of Kent.

updated 1 Sep 2007