Surname County Census Summaries Explanation

Southwest Virginia Project

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These surname mappings are designed to help understand the distribution of a given surname within a state. For the most part they have been developed in the context of thee Southwest Virginia Project, and intended to support migration studies for the early settlers of Southwest Virginia.

Data is extracted from census information for a given state and surname, and mapped onto a modern county boundary map. It would be preferable to map these data onto the county boundary maps contemporary with the particular census. While such boundary maps exist, they are not necessarily freely available for use on this site. Developing such maps would be useful, and may be attempted at some time in the future. In the interim, modern county boundary maps, adapted from the US Census Quick Facts, site, have been utilized. When viewing these maps, keep in mind that the county boundaries shown may be different from those contemporary with the data.

Note that these summaries are created using the Ancestry search engine. Ancestry includes "near matches" that sometimes represent legitimate alternative spellings of a given surname (e.g., Cowan vs Cowen. Sometimes surname are included that have no obvious association with the search (e.g, "Curtis" appearing in a search for "Cowan"). An attempt is made to capture all legitimate variants, but somethings slip through the cracks.