It’s Saturday night, which means it’s time for Randy Seaver’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun over at Geneamusings. The mission tonight is:
1)Â 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)Â 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)Â Write about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, or in a status or comment on Facebook.
I use Family Tree Maker because it’s what I started with many, many years ago. To count the surnames in my main family tree database, I went to the Publish tab and chose the Surname Report. I chose all individuals and had it Sort by surname count.
The report tells me IÂ have 1293 people in my tree. There are 35 surnames per page and the report I generated is almost 9 pages long. Consequently, I have about 310 different surnames. Most of those are for only one or two people, which suggests to me I have a lot more work to do!
The surname with the most entries is St. John with an even 100. This doesn’t surprise me as it is the name I’ve been working on the longest. 
Of these ten names, St. John, Coulman, Thomas, Oakley, Summerville, Fee, Hunter and Burton are ‘main’ lines for me. Barker and Reid are more collateral lines. It’s obvious to me which families I have spent the most time on – and now I can clearly see which ones need a bit more attention. Even though I’ve been doing research for nearly 20 years, it’s also apparent that the on and off nature of that research has been mostly ‘off’!
