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The Geography and Ethnicity of People’s Names

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Names, Ethnicity and Populations

Part of the book series: Advances in Spatial Science ((ADVSPATIAL))

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Abstract

Research on the spatial mobility of the population in Europe has demonstrated that most people don’t move too far away from where they were born, and tend to marry with people born in the same area. This has the obvious effect of maintaining family names “in-situ”. This chapter uses the current geographical distribution of people’s names in Europe and America to uncover historic and contemporary migration flows as well as regions of cultural interaction. The validity of different methods of spatial analysis using geocoded surname frequencies as raw material is justified. The chapter reviews a gallery of examples gathered from different countries and a range of scales, from the continent to a city’s neighbourhood. These maps show that once settled at their destinations, cliques of forenames and surnames have continued to operate following the same socio-cultural patterns described in the previous chapters. As a result, analysing a “destination” country’s contemporary name register over space we can identify not only the settlement pattern of current migrants, but also of historic migrant populations even several generations after they died.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology, CIESAS, Guadalajara, Mexico

    Pablo Mateos

  2. Department of Geography, University College London, London, UK

    Pablo Mateos

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  1. Pablo Mateos
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Mateos, P. (2014). The Geography and Ethnicity of People’s Names. In: Names, Ethnicity and Populations. Advances in Spatial Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45413-4_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45413-4_8

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-45413-4

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