The key to this one off exercise was to use immediately available resources to answer the question about the surname distribution. The Family Search 1881 census was an ideal resource and it was just a case of selecting the required Gloucestershire parishes in turn from the drop down. Running through the Bristol parishes takes about 10sec per parish but it obviously take a bit longer to find and select the particular south Gloucestershire parish if interest. The whole process took about an hour and may not have been an elegant solution but the end result gave me the info I wanted. Extracting the surname profile from the B&AFHS baptisms was even easier as I have imported the data into a database so can do searches not possible with the CDs. Chris Jefferies Cheltenham Glos -----Original Message----- From: bristol_and_somerset-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:bristol_and_somerset-bounces@rootsweb.com] On Behalf Of Roy Stockdill Sent: 03 December 2010 18:53 To: bristol_and_somerset@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [B&S] Re Surname Profiler On 3 Dec 2010 at 11:54, Chris Jefferies wrote: > After all that waiting for the Profiler to return I find that it won't > now do what I want! All I wanted to know was how occurrence of the > surname LOVELL in Somerset compared with that in Gloucestershire. I am > sure that last time I looked the info was displayed by county instead > of by postcode. > > I used Family Search instead which told me that in 1881 there were 555 > LOVELL living in Gloucestershire and 575 living in Somerset. Those in > Somerset seemed well spread out over the county but in Gloucestershire > the name was concentrated in the Bristol area. > Your search would have been resolved in probably under a couple of minutes had you owned a copy of Steve Archer's British Surname Atlas CD - quite the best bargain in genealogy at only £12, in my opinion. This takes all the data from the 1881 census and draws instant distribution maps showing where any one of thousands of surnames is most concentrated. The results table is shown by counties, Poor Law Unions (registration districts) and in terms of occurrences per 100,000 head of population. Variants can be included or a simple search for just one version can be done. The maps print out beautifully and the statistical results can be incorporated into databases. Some slight divergence from your own results is to be expected, but basically the results with Surname Atlas are very similar. This shows a total of 559 LOVELLs in Somerset and 550 in Gloucestershire. The top county for LOVELL was Middlesex with 978 actually occurrences. However, when looked at it terms of density, i.e. per 100,000, the principal centre of the surname in 1881 was Northamptonshire with 163 occurrences per 100,000. When the same calculation is applied in terms of Poor Law Unions, then the surname LOVELL is at easily its highest concentration in Keynsham - 685 occurrences per 100,000 - which would seem to bear out your own discoveries. The highest actual number of occurrences was at Barton Regis with 303. However, I cannot help wondering how long it took you to arrive at your results using FamilySearch and other sources when the results could have been achieved with Surname Atlas in just a few minutes? -- Roy Stockdill Genealogical researcher, writer & lecturer Newbies' Guide to Genealogy & Family History: www.genuki.org.uk/gs/Newbie.html "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." OSCAR WILDE ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to BRISTOL_AND_SOMERSET-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message