About the British Surname Website

This site was initially started as a caching copy of the Surname Profiler website created by University College London (UCL), originally available at http://cetl2.geog.ucl.ac.uk/UCLnames/default.aspx.

Following the transfer of the UCL site to its new home at National Trust Names, UCL requested that their data was removed from britishsurnames.co.uk. This site was then rebuilt using data obtained from other sources, including public domain information, material available under redistributable licences and data used with permission by the suppliers.

The recreation of the data from re-useable sources is an ongoing project and there are still some significant chunks missing from the original version of the site. In time, it's hoped to restore the majority of these, but there are likely to be some areas where this is simply impossible. The main problem is that availability of public domain or freely-licensable data for current surname distributions (one of the main features of the original site and the UCL data) is very patchy, and comprehensive data is expensive to licence - too expensive for a site which has no income other than a small amount of advertising revenue. At the moment, I probably have about half as much data as I need to be able to produce a reasonably accurate independent version of the UCL distribution maps. If anyone out there has access to surname distribution data that they can legitimately pass on to me, I would be very interested in hearing from you!

Comments, suggestions and even moans and gripes are welcome. You can contact me by email 'info {at} britishsurnames.co.uk', making the obvious replacement in the address.

Everything on this site is free to view, but if you like what you've seen then you could buy me a drink!

There is a separate page giving some more background information on the 1881 Census data.

The photo in the page header is a section the interior of the British Library Reading Room at the British Museum. You can see some more photos of the Reading Room, including the one that the header image is taken from, at my photo gallery.

Legal Stuff

Please take a moment to read this site's Privacy Policy.

Credits and Copyright

Design and programming are by Mark Goodge.

The layout and template of this site are based on a design available at Free CSS Templates.

1881 Census data is Crown Copyright and used under licence. PSI Click-use licence number C2008002006.

This site makes use of data provided by the Association of British Counties.