1) Find out the geographical distribution of your surname - in the world, in your state or province, in your county or parish. I suggest that you use the Public Profiler site at http://www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames/, which seems to work quickly and easily. However, you cannot capture the image as a photo file - you have to capture the screen shot, save it and edit it.
2) Tell us about your surname distribution in a blog post of your own (with a screen shot if possible), in comments to this post, or in comments on a social networking site like Facebook and Twitter.
For "Kleylein", I was curious if anything at all would come up, because it is not a common surname at all. Sure enough though, I got some hits:
According to this website, we Kleylein's only exist in 5 countries and within those countries, we're a pretty small percentage (frequency per million):
Germany - 3.05%
Belgium - 0.29%
US - 0.14%
Spain - 0.10%
Argentina - 0.08%
As far as I know, "Kleylein" originated in Germany and in fact is pretty localized to the Bayern region. I visited Unterrodach years ago, which is where my line of Kleylein's came from. That's consistent with this website that says Marktrodach is the Top City for finding Kleylein's.
Once my father gave up and joined Facebook along with the rest of the world, he immediately began searching for all the other Kleylein's he could find and sending them friend requests. Thanks to him, I'm FB friends with one of the Kleylein's in Argentina, which is pretty cool, considering there's even fewer of them there than in the US.
My mom's surname is another unique one ("Domelle"), so naturally I did a search on that one as well:
And yep, even less Domelle's are out there. Interestingly, the website says there are Domelle's in West county, Ireland. I'm not sure I buy that, since I know for sure my great-grandfather immigrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So, that is either a coincidence of spelling, or some person from the family moved to Ireland at some point. I also know for a fact there is a branch of the family in Canada, but Canada does not show any Domelle's for this website. Nobody's perfect I guess!
When I click on the map of the US for Domelle, it is pretty good in it's distribution by state, although I believe one state in the South is missing:
When the Domelle's immigrated, they mostly ended up in Indiana where they were farmers.
This is a fun little website, I did searches on pretty much every surname I have and then some. Thanks Randy!
Pretty cool, except it didn't catch the Kleyleins in Australia, Austria, Canada or Switzerland. We're very prolific. ;->
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