Site Seems To Guess Where Your Family Originates

 Some families live and die in the same town, and have done for centuries, while others move from one place to the next.

But regardless of which camp you fall into, a new web app claims to predict where you’re most likely to be from using just your family name.

‘Named’ was developed by researchers at University College London’s Department of Geography, and forms part of a larger project on UK surnames.

It uses data from the Consumer Data Research Centre to show where the surname is most concentrated in the UK, in comparison to the general population of the area, which can also reveal how common your name is.

Users type in their surname into the website and press ‘Go!’. The resulting heat map generated by the algorithm shows the highest density of the surname in red, with the lowest in pale yellow.

On his blog, UCL data scientist Oliver O’Brien wrote: ‘I put together the website and adapted for the UK some code on generating heat maps showing regions of unusual popularity of a surname.’

The researcher explained that the original code underpinning the UK maps was written by researchers at Arizona State University in the US.

‘The site is also a useful information gathering tool – we are only in the early stages of evaluating the validity or accuracy of this method – we know it works well for certain regional UK names which are not too popular or too rare, at least,’ O’Brien wrote.