Story by Laura, a Bodenschatz/Rooney/Strayer/Daly descendant

If you pause on this website’s home page to watch the ticker of related family names go by, you’ll notice that it takes quite a while to get from A to Z. While the surnames are all connected in one way or another to the “anchor” families of this website (those of “A” Bodenschatz and Meg Bodenschatz née Rooney), they are just a drop in the global and historical bucket.

Family names (surnames or last names) were not used for most of human history, and they came into use in different regions of the world at vastly different times. Family names were also not structured or passed down the same way everywhere. For example, in some cultures, the family name comes first in a person’s full name. In other communities, a surname in one generation becomes the first name (given name or forename) for those in the next generation. In others, numerous ancestral surnames combine to create multi-part surnames for the next generation. 

To give us some perspective, nearly 10 million surnames are represented in one of the world’s largest online family trees, FamilySearch.org. Depending on how one counts name spelling variations, some estimate that millions of additional surnames have each existed at some point in history.

To get a bit more specific, scholars believe approximately 850,000 Germanic surnames, 45,000 English surnames, 15-16,000 Irish surnames, 6,000 Chinese surnames, and a whopping four million surnames have been in use over time in India. 

The following names (listed here in alphabetical order), are among the most common surnames in use today: Ali, Brown, Devi, García, González, Hernández, Johnson, Li, Müller, Nguyen, Singh, Smirnov, Smith, Wang, Wilson, Yang, and Zhang. 

Interestingly, just three surnames (Wang, Li, and Zhang) account for over 20% of China’s population today. At the same time, four English-speaking countries (Australia, Great Britain, Canada, and the U.S.A.) share their current most common surname: Smith.

Turning back to our ticker of names on the home page: are your family names represented there? If not, please jot us a note so we can add them the family parade of names.