Map your name
I found this really cool site today called map your name where you can find out how common your name is in different countries in western Europe, in the USA and in Australia.
Daniel is a common first name in the USA, but the distribution of it in Europe surprises me. Sweden is big on that map, as expected, but I wouldn’t have guessed that the place where Daniel’s are most common are France and small parts of Ireland.
The last name Eliasson is predictably uncommon outside of Scandinavia, but here the USA has a surprise: there’s quite a bit of Eliasson’s there, surely the descendants of emigrants. But look where they are. Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota are maybe not so surprising, that’s where you’d expect to find the Swedish emigrants. But there’s an isolated population of Eliasson’s in Connecticut that surprises me.
It would be great fun to find out the historical reasons to this distribution of names.
Where is your name common?