IStock Photo 3445825 © Jill Fromer

Carson Smith doesn’t mind sharing his surname with 2,376,206 other Americans. “I have an unusual first name so the last name is fine,” says the marketing analyst from Washington, DC. The only problem with being a Smith, he says, is that “sometimes people don’t believe me when I tell them my last name.”

According to the 2000 United States Census, Smith is the most popular last name in the country, shared by about 0.9% of the population. The odds a person has a last name of Smith are 1 in 116.5. Smith and another 6 names, (Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller and Davis), account for one in every 25 people—about 4% of the population.

The origin of last names came about after the breakdown of feudalism in Europe. As serfs began to establish their own identities as businesspeople and homeowners, they took on last names, like Johnson (son of John) or Smith (indicating occupation), to use for formal documentation. According to Carson Smith, he acquired his last name from his father’s ancestors, the Schmidts, who came over in the late 1800s from Germany. Schmidt and Smith refer to the same occupation: blacksmith, or more generically, metal worker.

About 70,000 surnames cover 90 percent of Americans, but what about less common last names, like Laliemthavisay, Samaranayaka, or Py? The 2000 Census found more than 4 million unique last names in the United States, making the odds that a person has a unique last name among census entries 1 in 66.76. The majority of these entries, however, are not peoples’ names at all: they are the result of errors made in the surname field of the census survey. Instead of writing out the actual last name of Doe, for instance, census takers wrote in JohnDoe, JDoe, or Do. Though those kinds of errors make it less than a sure thing, the Web has made it easier to get a good idea of how many people share your name.

Truly unique last names arise in a number of ways. Some people are simply the last of the line; all their living relatives have different names due to marriage or other circumstances. Married couples can hyphenate two names, creating a unique new one. Then there are the occasional cases of people who create their own last names. Last November, 19-year-old George Garratt of Britain, legally changed his name to Captain Fantastic Faster Than Superman Spiderman Batman Wolverine The Hulk And The Flash Combined.

The major source for unique names in the United States is immigration. A surname like Daskalopoulou may be uncommon in America though not in Greece. During the large immigration waves, new immigrants often shortened or altered their surnames, sometimes creating new ones. The common notion that immigration officials assigned new or altered names, though, has been discredited. Historians have shown that the names were entered in ships’ logs before the boats sailed, and that name changes generally occurred in the naturalization (citizenship) process rather than during immigration.

Ethnic, religious, and economic circumstances can create small concentrations of uncommon surnames. Even among city directories, there may be names that appear multiple times in one but not at all in another.

As for Mr. Flash Combined, he’ll always have a special place in the phone book.

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