What’s in a name

Small things can make a big difference. Amelia has posted on a post-grad project from UCL which is designed to help understand the concept of Britishness by mapping surnames.  You can have a go yourself here.

I’ve always been really annoyed when people assumptively put an ‘s’ on the end of my surname (just one of those things that gets my goat). People do it because apparently Perkins is a lot more common than Perkin. So I thought I’d check it out. And what a difference one letter makes. The Perkin map is on the left (the darker the colour the more Perkin people there are). Defintely skewed south west, and there seems to be a Perkin clan in Staffordshire. The Perkins Map is on the right. Tonnes more of them and Midlands and South Wales seem to be where it’s at…