Frequency of new names being added

Question

I’ve added quite a few profiles with LNAB-1 recently while mining the data for Canton Valais, Switzerland that went online only a few years ago.

It makes me curious about the statistics for “name growth” in the tree. Is the frequency at which new surnames are added to the tree decreasing? Staying constant? How many new surnames are added each week? What percentage of new profiles added are new?

Comments

Hi Barry, I'm also very interested in this — I too have recently added some LNAB-1 profiles.

Answer 1

It is remarkably consistent over time! This is from a recent data dump with 32M profiles and 935k unique last names.

This plot shows the date of first registration for every surname in order from earliest to latest (click for full size):

It looks like ~75k new surnames are added every year.

Comments

Wow. If only most trends were so linear! It’s like the slowing you’d expect from saturation has been exactly counterbalanced by the speed up in overall profile additions coming from the increasing number of active users.

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Yeah, it's so linear it made me wonder if I was plotting it wrong, but I checked a few names and it seems right. That's a good point about competing pressures, interesting!

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Fascinating!

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If you limit to surnames with at least 10 profiles you can see the slowdown you suggested over time (axes are a bit confusing here, steeper line means slower profile creation). There are 175k surnames with at least 10 profiles vs. 962k total.

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Ooh, with 75K per year, it will hit a million surnames soon! Thanks for the plots.

Answer 2

Hey Cousin Barry! 9th Cousin!  This has nothing to do with your question!  You have 8th Grandparents named "Swift", and so do I. But Taylor Swift, yes the current music chart topper is my 8th cousin.  So, I ran the connection finder between you and Taylor.  I think you will literally have to change your underwear! 

Connection Finder:

Taylor Swift (b. 1980s) | WikiTree FREE Family Tree  

to  

Barry Smith (b. 1970s) | WikiTree FREE Family Tree

Comments

Yes, I had noticed! But I’m not a Swiftie. So it’s cool, but my underwear is fine.

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Cousin, ain't WikiTree FUN!  Sorry, I hijacked your question!