Saturday, March 26, 2011

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Count the Surnames

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 (GMP; either software 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 how many surnames are in your database and, if possible, which Surname has the most entries.  If this excites you, tell us which surnames are in the top 5!  Or 10!

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

NOTE:  If you can't figure out how to do this in your GMP, use the Help button and search for "count persons" then follow directions. 

Here's mine:

Well, I must admit to being somewhat dismayed that I could not discover a way to achieve this with my GMP (Genealogy Management Program).  I use MyHeritage's Family Tree Builder as my main GMP.  Not only could I not find a way to do this, the help file didn't have any information I could find on how I might do this either.

So I cheated.  I exported a current GEDCOM file, and imported it in the free version of Legacy 7.   It took me a couple of minutes of looking, but I finally stumbled on the very easy method of clicking on Help, and then General Information.  Up came a little box with a number of statistics, including number of unique surnames.

It turns out I currently have 5944 individuals from 1722 families with 1192 unique surnames.  I couldn't find details like a Top Ten or anything.  It's possible those things are in the Deluxe version.

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