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, and if possible, which Surname has the most entries. If this excites you, tell us which surnames are in the top 5!
4) Write about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, or in a status or comment on Facebook.
It is rather interesting that Randy and I are almost the same when it comes to total of names. I have 39,849 per RootsMagic and my RootsWeb tree. He and I are also cousins several times, so share a few surnames.
To do my report, I used RootsMagic4 and located the Create a Report option, then the Lists and found the Surname Statistics list, then the Frequency of surnames. Within seconds I had a report of 98 pages. Fortunately, no unknowns because I list the women with the husbands, as Mary w/o John Westover.
In my list below, the last two names, Adams and Poole were probably numbers 15 and 19, but since I wanted to display them for my benefit, so I deleted other names (Davis, Hess, Lay, Cressey, Bockus, Cross, Newell, Steevens, Mead, Wilder, Fitch and Wyckoff).
| SURNAME | ALL | MALES | FEMALES | EARLIEST | LATEST |
| WESTOVER | 917 | 474 | 436 | 1619 | 2008 |
| SCRAMBLING | 610 | 292 | 317 | 1695 | 2009 |
| KELSEY | 460 | 233 | 227 | 1609 | 1970 |
| TEN EYCK | 432 | 233 | 198 | 1617 | 2009 |
| | 202 | 102 | 100 | 1602 | 2008 |
| | 198 | 102 | 95 | 1609 | 1999 |
