Have you ever wondered how many people share your surname or the surname you are researching?  Well, the U.S. Census Bureau receives numerous requests to supply information concerning name frequency.  In order to answer these requests, the Census Bureau produced a tabulation of names from the 1990 Census.  The name frequency project has produced a frequency and a ranking for surnames, as well as male and female first names.  Although no information specific to individuals is available from this project, the rankings, particularly for surnames is of interest to genealogists.

A high frequency and the resulting rank of a surname makes research more difficult. This is especially true in light of the new Internet based databases now available for research.  Have you ever tried to find a John Smith or a John Johnson?   Most people probably know that Smith and Johnson are ranked number one and two respectively in the U.S.  But do you know where your surname is ranked?

The Census Bureau provides the results of the ranking project on their web page at:

http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names

The twenty-five surnames with the highest frequency plus some of the names of interest to Knowles researchers, with their respective ranking, frequency and the approximate U.S. population using those surnames are shown in the Surname Distribution Table below

At the time of the 1990 U.S. Census, the ten most common male first names were (in descending order): 

James

John

Robert

Michael

William

David

Richard

Charles

Joseph

Thomas 

At the time of the 1990 U.S. Census, the ten most common female first names were (in descending order): 

Mary

Patricia

Linda

Barbara

Elizabeth

Jennifer

Maria

Susan

Margaret

Dorothy

As you can see from the Surname Distribution Table below, the surnames of most interest to Knowles researchers have very low frequencies.  This is advantageous to us as traditional genealogists as well as for the genetic genealogy studies.  However, the number of ‘original' Knowles Progenitors is probably numbered in the 100s.  The Knowles Surname DNA Project will go along way to separate the living Knowles and their ancestors into their respective Knowles lines, headed by one of the 100s of Knowles Progenitors.  See PROGENITORS.

Those of us researching the families with the KNOWLES surname and its variants are many times thankful that we are not researching SMITH, JOHNSON or JONES, just because those surnames appear so often in the source documents.  It is difficult enough trying to determine if you have found the correct record for William KNOWLES;  imagine looking for the right John SMITH.

The following table identifies the distribution of surnames in the U.S. as of the 1990 Population Census for the top 25 names as well as for a few of the surnames of interest to Knowles researchers; that are NOT in the top 25.   The data for the Surname Distribution Table is from the U.S. Census Bureau.  The Census Bureau has determined and published the distribution for over 80,000 U.S. surnames.