Vampires

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the incidence of Vampires is extremely low in the United States.  In 1880,  four Vampires: Otto; Jean; Julianne; and Mary, all in their twenties, were living in Cheyenne,  Wyoming.  They claimed to be actors. In 1870,  there was just one Vampire in the United States, 26 year-old machinist George Vampire.  Of course he lived in New York City.   What happened to these five Vampires  in the 20th century?  Were they forced to leave or did they on their own just pull out up stakes and leave?

According to the World Names Profiler (WNP), Germany and the United States have the greatest incidence of Vampires in the world.  Germany’s statistic is 0.04 per million, while in the U.S., the figure is 0.01 Vampires per million people.  Regionally, the American Vampires are located in Oklahoma, according to the WNP.  The Sooner state has a Vampire index of 1.04 per million.  With a 2008 estimated population of 3,640,000 or so,  there would be about four Vampires in Oklahoma.   I found in public records three listings in Lawton, Oklahoma, for Madonna Vampire.  Unfortunately for her, there are at least thirty people named Buffy in Oklahoma presently.

Zombies

Nearly all the Zombies in the census records turned out to be mis-transcriptions of other names.  The WNP reports no Zombies in the United States.  Public records reviews show about 14 Zombies in various places around the country.

Ghosts

Kraft Ghost of Fayette County, Pennsylvania, and Leonard Ghost of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, both listed on the 1790 federal census appear to be the first two Ghosts in America.  But in the 1900 census, the number of Ghosts expands exponentially.  Most of these “new” Ghosts are Native Americans in the upper Midwest.  The WNP indicates a Ghost index of 18.29 per million in South Dakota and 3.37 per million in Nebraska.  South Dakota’s estimated 2008 population was 804,000, which would yield about 15 Ghosts. Public records reveal about 17 Ghosts in South Dakota (when obvious duplicates are eliminated).

Nebraska’s estimated population is about 1.8 million, suggesting something a bit more than six Ghosts.  I was able to find only one Ghost in Nebraska in public records. The rest seem to have vanished.

And how about Pennsylvania where it seems to have begun for Ghosts in America?   WNP’s Pennsylvania Ghost index is 2.58 per million.   That would mean about 32 Ghosts presently among Pennsylvania’s estimated 12.45 million folks.  I was able to identify 25 Ghosts in Pennsylvania public records after eliminating duplicates and two entries which appeared to refer to religious organizations.

Ghouls

Apparently, the first Ghoul in America was 66 year-old Christian Ghoul of Maryland, a German immigrant.  He appears on the 1870 census.  Few other Ghouls seem to have been counted until the 1900 census, where like the Ghosts, the Ghouls grew rapidly in number.  And like the Ghosts, most of the “new” Ghouls were Indians, living primarily in Tehama County, California.

When it comes to Ghouls, the United States doesn’t even register in the WNP top ten. (Number one is France, with a Ghoul incidence of 4.59 per million; Switzerland is a distant second at 1.92 per million, supporting evidence that the Gauls may be the most Ghoulish people on Earth). (Hey, I just report the facts!)

Within in the U.S., however, Ghouls seem to be concentrated around Las Vegas and Chicago, at least according to the WNP.  Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas, and Will County, Illinois, adjacent to Chicago, were the only two counties in which the WNP found any Ghouls at all. Curiously, public records show no Ghouls in Nevada and six in the Chicago area.  Overall, public records indicate something more than 100 Ghouls in America presently, with perhaps as many as 10% of those in California.   This is the biggest disparity I’ve ever seen between WNP data and public records. [The WNP's FAQs state: "All our names and location data are derived from publicly available telephone directories or national electoral registers, sourced for the period 2000-2005."]

Goblins

A man named Goblin was first in recorded in New York City in the 1850 census.  In 1860 there was still just one Goblin on the census and that was 14-year-old Lucinda Goblin who lived with the Davenport household in Columbia, Missouri.  But just 10 years later, the 1870 census showed that three fourths of the (four) Goblins in the USA lived in North Carolina.  By 1900 however, the number of Goblins in America had increased nearly eight-fold to a total of 33, to be found in every region of the country.

Globally, the number of Goblins in the U.S. doesn’t make the slightest statistical ripple, using WNP data.  Number one is France, again, with  0.2 Goblins per million.  The United Kingdom is far, far, behind with 0.02 per million.

Witches

We all know the history of Witch hunts in America. Surprisingly enough however only one Witch appears on the 1790 census and that would be Peter Witch of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (just what is it with Pennsylvania and Lancaster in particular?).  There was also a Witch in Rutledge County, Alabama, in 1790.  By 1900, Witches were routinely enumerated in the census all over the country.  Sadly, two of them were little boys: Jacob Witch, 10 years old, and his brother, Henry Witch five years old, who were apparently in an orphanage in Las Galinas, Marin County, California.

Turns out that there are far more Witches in the U.K. and Canada than in the USA (the only countries reporting any Witches at all).  The British Witch population (0.5 per million) is concentrated in Newport (Casnewydd), Wales, and the southwest jurisdictions of North Somerset, Bath and Northeast Somerset, as well as the City of Bristol.  There are also a few Witches in Surrey.

According to WNP, Manitoba’s  Witch frequency of 2.93 per million accounts for the whole of Canada’s 0.23 per million Witch index. Manitoba has an estimated population of 1.2 million; all of Canada consists of 31.6 million people. Mathematically, that does not work out.  Unfortunately the WNP provincial map of Manitoba gives no further details.

The U.S. Witch frequency is a comparatively minuscule 0.04 per million.  WNP finds Witches concentrated in Dickinson County, Kansas, and Howard County, Maryland.  A public records search reveals about twelve Witches in  the USA (eliminating commercial enterprises like plumbing and construction ["Ditch Witch"] and fast food restaurants [Fish Witch"]).  None of the Witches were found in Kansas and of the two in Maryland, neither was in Howard County.

Pumpkins

John Pumpkin appears as the only one of his surname on the 1820 census.  He lived in Fayette Count, Kentucky.  Virtually no other Pumpkins are found in the census until 1880.  In that year, Pumpkins were concentrated in two areas of the country: Fresno County, California, and Greene County, Georgia.  The latter jurisdiction included a young lady, 15 years old, named  Etta Pumpkin.  Following a pattern that we’ve seen before, the 1900 census showed a huge increase in the number of Pumpkins in America. Again this had to do with the number of Native Americans enumerated on the census in that year.  The Indian Pumpkins were primarily on reservations in the upper Midwest.  By 1910, however, they were concentrated in Madera County, California, and Cherokee County, Oklahoma.  The Oklahoma Pumpkins included one Mary Pumpkin Gritts.

The WNP data shows the expected distribution of Pumpkins in the USA based on historical data.  South Dakota, Montana, and Oklahoma are leading Pumpkin states, based presumably on the frequency of the name among Indians.

Other “Important” News

While I was whacking away on Halloween themes, I started wondering about some other things. Not only did I find unexpected discrepancies with the usually reliable World Names Profiler, but I also now have reason to question the competence of the Census Bureau, whose data report not a single Fool, Clown, or Jackass has ever been enumerated in Washington, D.C.

In the comments to the last post  our friend Apple [her blog is Apple's Tree; visit it!] writes:

It certainly seems like the right family. I’ve seen some interesting name variations but how did they get Guion from Gines? Or visa versa. I’d be very comfortable going with this.

That’s the very question presented for our consideration today!  Surnames can prop up  brick wall for far longer than one would think.  The problem could be exacerbated for descendants of formerly enslaved people–who sometimes changed their surnames, if they had surnames, after emancipation.  But, it’s really a potential problem for everybody, especially in a culture like ours which has no indigenous surnames:

Strictly speaking, there are no American surnames. They are all imported, the same as all so-called English surnames have, at different periods, been imported into England, excepting perhaps what remains of the ancient British, Gaelic, and Celtic. But they become American by adoption, just as persons of foreign birth become American citizens by naturalization or domiciliation. Hundreds of these families have been domiciled in this country for over a century and a half; in fact, ever since the early colonial period. By what other nomenclature can they be called?

Amos M. Judson,  A Grammar of American Surnames (Washington: J.F. Sheiry, 1898), p.2

To put it another way:

In the States the wear and tear of names, which in England extends over ten centuries, has been concentrated into one, and instead of half a dozen elements we have sources innumerable. In the early days of the Republic the problem was simpler, for the sparse population was drawn from practically four sources, British, Dutch, French, and German. In the earliest census taken, its interesting to notice the distribution of these names. We find, as we should expect, the French in the south, the Dutch in and around New York, and the Germans in Pennsylvania. But, since the time of the first census (1790), immigrants have crowded in from most countries, civilized and uncivilized, and their changed, distorted, or adapted names form a pathless etymological morass. . . .

The possible variants and derivatives of any given personal name run theoretically into thousands, and in France and Germany, to take the two most important countries of which the surname system is related to our own, there has been no check on this process of differentiation. By contraction, aphesis, apocope, dialect variation, and many other phonetic factors, one favourite name often develops hundreds of forms, many of which appear to have nothing in common with the original.

Ernest Weekley,  Surnames (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. 1916) pp.8-9 (footnote omitted).

Some other factors that affect American genealogical research with respect to surnames are:

• A general lack of literacy in the population before the advent of universal education.
• A general lack of standardization of spelling among the literate.
• Reliance by census takers and  vital records officials on unknowledgeable informants.
• Mis-pronunciation or a lack of standardized pronunciation of surnames.
• Regional differences in culture.

These issues will be familiar to anyone who has spent any considerable time in research.  All of them came to bear on my Gines brick wall.

When I was a pre-schooler, I learned that our maternal family name was pronounced with a hard “G” and that it was spelled GINES. It seemed to be an unusual name and as I grew up and used it or heard it used by relatives, listeners would not infrequently say, “What?” or “How do you spell that?” or sometimes rudely, “What kinda name is that?”  My mother would reply, “It’s French.”  She said her father told her that.  But when I started  genealogical research in earnest, it appeared to me that most of the  GINES surnamed people in  the United States had come from England.

I have written before about the five main Gines family groups in the United States.  In sorting out my issue here, we don’t need to disturb the Latino, Pacific Islander, or LDS family groups very much. So we’ll focus on the German/English family groups, and add a bit (or more) of French!

We also can narrow the scope of our inquiry by understanding which name variants are “true” name variants and which are merely mistakes in spelling, transcription, or pronunciation.  I realize that it can be said that “mistakes” in spelling, transcription, or pronunciation are precisely the factors that create “true” separate names or variations.  So here I refer to the “one-off” sort of error that is not repeated to the extent that it becomes the name.

I have previously pointed out that many of my Gines forebears had their names rendered many different ways during the nineteenth century.  For example, Rebecca Maner Gines (1844-1931) was “Beckey Guines” on the 1870 census, Rebecca Gines on her husband’s death certificate;Becky Gines on the 1899 tax rolls of Tensas Parish and then Rebecca Gynes on her own death certificate.  Ed Gines, the brotehr of Richard Gines, was a “Guion” in 1870, “Gines” in 1880, “Genes” in 1900, and “Guynes.”  There are more versions beyond these two examples: Gions, Giones, Guions, Guins, Guines, Ganes, Guyns, and Gaynes.  How can we tell if these are “mistakes” or are legitimate names with independent etymologies?

For answers to that, I turn to World Names Profiler, a service of Public Prfofiler.org.   The designers say that they have data for about 300 million people in 26 different countries, representing a total population of 1 billion people.  They claim that ther hgave 8 million unique surnames.  For more information about the database, see the FAQs posted at this link.

I  realize that there are more sophisticated instruments for the analysis performed below, but this will give us a rough, good-enough notion about the conclusions.

Here’s how it works:

We search for a name, let’s say Guiones for example, using the Profiler. The Profiler will tell us the worldwide distribution of that name.  Click on the video link below and watch what happens when we search for “Guiones.”

Guiones

The Profiler reports:

The conclusion must be that this i s not a legitimate name.  It may be  inferred that to the extent that such a spelling ever appeared in public records, the occurrence or frequency thereof was extremely  insignificant.   On the other hand, click on the video link below and watch happens when we search for “Guyns:”

Guyns_SDM

There are matches, but apparently only in the United States.  On the theory that there are no indigenous “American” surnames, we could conclude that “Guyns” is not a “legitimate” surname, but likely a one-off error  in trying to render something else.  This inference is strengthened when the Profiler tells us that the name is found at a significant threshold only in one county in Missouri.  A search of Ancestry.com’s census records locates “Guyns” historically as numbering 19 individuals, all in Oklahoma in 1910; and then literally ones and twos in a couple states between 1910 and 1920.

We can eliminate many of the purported names by showing that they do not exist in any significant number anywhere in the world or that they only occur in the United States and they are not “Native American” names.

How does all this relate to my brick wall problem?  We’ll see that next time.

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