Marie OK, maybe Bell wasn't an extreme example. Using the 1911 Census in County Durham as a base, out of 750 marriages one would expect the following number of marriages out of 750 where one partner is a Thubron, with the ones I found in brackets: Thompson 7.5 (10) Brown 8 (10) Bell 5.7 (8) Harrison 3.2 (8) Hutchinson 2.4 (8) Smith 10.5 (6) Mills 0.6 (5) Apart from Smith I think you will agree the others are significantly higher than one would expect. Obviously this is counterbalanced by all those common names that don't appear in my results, but the point I was trying to make is that where there were several of the same surname, there were more than you would expect (except for Smith). And just for good measure, one would have expected 0.09 Thubron to Thubron marriages - there were actually 3, but that is a special case! Adrian On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 9:34 PM, Marie Byatt <[email protected]> wrote: > Having been born a Bell...let me assure you....we are everywhere...check the > census numbers > > Having just got a birth certificate to determine which of two > similarly surnamed women was the mother of one of my ONS people > (THUBRON), I decided to check how many marriage partners in my ONS had > matching surnames, and was somewhat surprised. > > This is a fairly rare name and I like to think I have collected all > the THUBRON marriages from the GRO Register, which amounts to about > 750 from 1837 to 2005. Out of these 750 marriages there were many > multiple occurrences of the same surname. The most common are: > > Thompson - 10 > Brown - 10 > Bell - 8 > Harrison - 8 > Hutchinson - 8 > Smith - 6 > Mills - 5 > > Many of them are possibly siblings/cousins marrying into the same > family, and the majority of the marriages were in the Northeast of > England. But I never considered Bell and Mills to be very common > names. > > Adrian