January 24, 2006
Cool Tool!
Famed NASA scientist and regular Possumblog reader Steevil (whose brother is Dr. Weevil) sent me a link to a very interesting website--The Surname Profiler from the University College of London, which you can use to look up the geographic concentration of various surnames in Great Britain (excluding Northern Ireland). Steevil notes that it seems to be overloaded with search requests, and indeed it timed out a couple of times this morning with me--BUT, when it's working, it is very cool indeed.
It was quite interesting to me, because I have alway figured that since the original Oglesby of my family who entered the Carolinas back in the 1760s was from Scotland, that there should be by all rights a greater concentration of them still in that area of the UK. Imagine my surprise when I looked at the distribution for 1998, and saw that most of the few people with that name lived in the southern portion of the kingdom.
The bigger surprise? I looked on the 1881 map, expecting at least THAT one to be more to my supposition, and there were even fewer with that surname, and they were even MORE concentrated, most of them right around Lincolnshire.
Time to do more research!
UPDATE: IN A RELATED STORY, Steevil sends along this link describing the effort to reduce the consumption of haggis in Scottish nursery schools to only once per week. As the article notes, this is the same frequency recommended for turkey twizzlers.
Thanks, Steevil--now you've gone and made me all hungry!
Posted by Terry Oglesby at January 24, 2006 09:36 AMvelly, velly cool indeed
Posted by: DaveH at January 24, 2006 10:08 AMThink I should have a go at it. Maybe I can get it to hang up for hours.
Posted by: jim at January 24, 2006 10:11 AMSeems the Andersons were and are Scots and here I thought they came from Texas.
Posted by: Larry Anderson at January 24, 2006 10:15 AMWhat if this is all an elaborate hoax!?
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at January 24, 2006 10:18 AMLarry
I thought they were from Georgia and Alabama. At least that is what my grandmother told me.
Jim,
Maybe my Great-Grandpa Anderson got lost on the trip from Georgia to Alabama and went by the way of Texas.
Or maybe he went to Texas and found there was insufficient corn for his business needs and returned to Alabama.
Posted by: Larry Anderson at January 24, 2006 10:35 AMHmmm. Looks like my tribe hails from Nottingham...
May that robbing hood was really an Aardvark!
Posted by: LittleA at January 24, 2006 10:57 AMor May-BE
Posted by: LittleA at January 24, 2006 10:58 AMI don't know, LittleA--in the Disney version, he was a fox, not an aardvark.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at January 24, 2006 11:28 AMThat's just because Disney has an irrational hatred of all things Aardvark. I think it all stems from an attempted zoo break where a young Walt was held hostage by a bunch of Aarvark hooligans and forced to read the three month's worth of Mary Worth comics lining their burrow over and over again until he snapped.
Either that or it was just historical ignorance on the animator's part.
Posted by: LittleA at January 24, 2006 11:43 AMI really prefer strawberry Twizzlers to turkey ones.
Posted by: Jordana at January 24, 2006 11:50 AMMary Worth!? I'm surprised young Walt survived. But thank goodness he did, or otherwise we might never have Tinkerbell. I think that's a worthy tradeoff for historical inaccuracy.
And Jordana, I think you might change your mind if you could get cherry Twizzlers with the rich flavor of turkey injected into them.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at January 24, 2006 11:57 AMInteresting that the 1881 concentrations of Gore and Davenport are within a couple of counties of one another.
Geez, I could be related to that guy.
Posted by: Janis at January 24, 2006 12:35 PMOh well--what's good enough for Jerry Lee Lewis oughta be good enough for the rest of us.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at January 24, 2006 12:45 PMWay coo, I like comparing the 1881 to the 1998 populations. I might just do a posty thingy about this.
Posted by: Sarah G. at January 24, 2006 03:52 PMJust remember that it's all Steevil's fault.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at January 24, 2006 04:07 PM