Abstract
A recent workshop entitled "The Family Name as Socio-Cultural Feature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods" was held in Paris in December 2010, sponsored by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and by the journal Human Biology. This workshop was intended to foster a debate on questions related to the family names and to compare different multidisciplinary approaches involving geneticists, historians, geographers, sociologists and social anthropologists. This collective paper presents a collection of selected communications.
Highlights
In 1983, Human Biology published a special May issue devoted to surnames as tools to evaluate average consanguinity, to assess population isolation and structure, and to estimate the intensity and directionality of migrations
The few methods used in this paper allow us to conclude that the various Canadian parishes in Quebec were, at the end of the 18th century, not very strongly structured, reflecting the dispersal of the previous generations, but maintaining exchanges and migrations at short distances between neighboring places, and retaining the Saint-Laurent River and the two main centers of population (Montreal and Quebec) as the most important delineating geographical elements
We were able to confirm their inferred place of origin based on 16th-century surname information for two Upper Savio Valley parishes from previous research (Boattini & Pettener 2005)
Summary
In 1983, Human Biology published a special May issue (volume 55, issue 2) devoted to surnames as tools to evaluate average consanguinity, to assess population isolation and structure, and to estimate the intensity and directionality of migrations. The first research direction relies on the use of surname databases that are increasingly exhaustive and easy to analyse thanks to the spread of digital techniques In this respect, Pablo Mateos, James Cheshire and Paul Longley’s UCL Worldnames database (which includes about 6 million surnames registered in 26 different countries, http://worldnames.publicprofiler.org/), constitutes an impressive quantity of information and an exciting tool for future research (Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives in the Spatial Analysis of Names, this article). Computer-Based Surname Geography, this article) is based on the 2005 telephone directory of the Federal Republic of Germany and contains a set of one million different surname types accounting for about thirty million entries This corpus can be organized according to linguistic properties (lexis, phonology, graphemics, and morphology) and to surname type (derived from place names, professions, nicknames, first names), allowing a quite deep exploration of the regional variation of surnames. Their Family Names of the United Kingdom Project is an assemblage of data coming
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