GBNames focuses upon the origins and spread of family bloodlines through surnames as manifest in the past and over more recent years. Alpha release. This repository contains all code for the website to run -- not the code for generating the statistics and measures that are presented on the website.

Digitally encoded historical census data for England, Scotland, and Wales provided by the Economic and Social Research Council I-CeM project provide population-wide micro-data of individuals’ names and addresses (following a secure data user agreement by researchers). This integrated collection of historic census micro-data derives from the decennial Censuses of England and Wales for 1851, 1861, 1881, 1891, 1901 and 1911, and for Scotland for the period 1851 to 1901 (although we do not use the 1871 data). Addresses are geo-referenced to parishes,the boundaries of which have been digitised. See for more information: Higgs and Schürer 2014.

Individual names and addresses cannot be obtained from censuses until the data are 100 years old, and so we use consumer registers for the period 1997-2016: details of these data are available in Lansley, Li, and Longley 2019.

GBNames is intended to show interesting geographical patterns of names, rather than mapping individuals or families. We do not map or show statistics for names with less than 100 occurrences per year or for areas where the selected name has a very small population. This branch contains the GBNames version that is planned to be rolled out publicly with the maps using an updated methodology.