Familial Ties

Gisborne has the highest concentration of the surname Blair – and Northland the surname Beckham – in the English-speaking world, according to a new website which enables the names of people to be tracked to the places they live. Set up by geographers at University College London (UCL), the site, www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames has a database which holds 300 million names of people in 26 countries, representing a population of about a billion, or nearly a sixth of the world. The site shows in particular how Anglo-Saxon and Celtic names have spread over the globe with the English-speaking diaspora, with the result that they are sometimes more frequent in the former colonies than they are in the country of origin. The surnames Adlington and Cameron are most prevalent in New Zealand.