SNGF ~ How Many Surnames in Your Family Tree Database?

I’m joining in Saturday Night Genealogy Fun blog meme hosted by Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings.  This weeks challenge is:
1) Go into your Genealogy Management Program (GMP; either software on your computer, or an online family tree) and figure out how to Count how many surnames you have in your family tree database.
2) Tell us which GMP you're using and how you did this task.
3) Tell us how many surnames are in your database and, if possible, which Surname has the most entries. If this excites you, tell us which surnames are in the top 5! Or 10!! Or 20!!!
4) Write about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, in a status or comment on Facebook, or in Google Plus Stream post.

 My main genealogy database is in RootsMagic 7.  I do use a number of programs but chose RootsMagic for this challenge because has my largest database currently.

To find out how many surnames are in my database I went to the Reports menu tab and selected List.  From that popup menu I chose Surname Statistics List.  The surname statistics list offers a number of sorting selections.  I chose to sort by surname frequency. 

RootsMagic surname report



This produced a 78 page report and each page contained about 49 names.  I wasn’t going to sit and count them all!  This gives me an estimated number of surnames 3822.

My top 20 surnames are:


This was an interesting topic to look at.  First I’ve discovered that I have way to many “unknown” names for my liking.  These span a wide range of time.  Some of these are in my direct lines, however many are in distant cousin branches.  It’s on my to-do list to try and figure out who these people are.  I also see that at some point I’ve imported/merged a cousins database who used @@ symbols in the name field.  ARG!  I no longer import gedcoms into my master file, but I will have to go back and clean that up as well.

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