My mother’s maiden name is Bantam. This sounded like a perfectly normal last name to me but then there were a lot of Bantam families in my hometown. My grandfather and his two brothers each married and raised medium to large sized families in my hometown so there was no shortage of Bantam families in Harlan Co. Nebraska.
My dad’s surname and my maiden name is Boehler. My great grandfather, Conrad Boehler, was the only one in his family to come to the United States. So basically my dad’s family was all there was in the area leading me to believe that it was more uncommon than Bantam. That was before I started doing genealogy!
Once I learned how to research the families that notion changed. While there weren’t many other Boehler families directly related I found that the name was not as uncommon as I had originally thought.
A fun tool to use to see just how many families of a certain name were in the United States at a period of time is found on Ancestry.com. Below you can see how many families and where they were living in 1920. My families were both in Nebraska in 1920 but as you can see there were a lot more states with people of the surname Boehler in the US than there were of the surname Bantam.
Ancestry.com also allows you to select different time periods. If you wonder how unusual your surname really is you should check it out.
*Screenshots were taken from Ancestry.com
#52Ancestors #Unusualname
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