Until I became interested in genealogy I thought that I came from a family
of bad spellers. Heyes is not the normal way to spell Hayes.
I then traced my roots back to Lancashire and found that as far as that
county was concern Heyes is a very common way of spelling Hayes. Furthermore, the majority of those
who use this spelling come from Lancashire.
As the map shows 63% of the total of 3281 adults in the United Kingdom
who spell their name Heyes live in Lancashire.
I now find that many UK family surnames are very localised. Hence the interest in mapping. Using data obtained from the CD ROM of the UK Electoral Role I am now able to plot distribution maps for ANY surname. The maps show considerable detail and are not seen at their best over the web, but, be assured, the printed (A4) version is good enough to frame and put on the wall.
If not convinced, you can see a detail of the above map, just click here.
Note: the CD I use is dated 2000. This is the oldest CD I have found covering the UK. On the assumption that people are becoming more mobile it would seem that the older the data is, the better!
If your name is Heyes you are lucky.
Click on: HERE to download a zipped up bitmap file
of your personal map. The download file is less than 400 KBytes but when
unzipped it expands to more tnan 8 MBytes. Print out your map
with the printer set to "Normal" not to "Best".
If your name is not Heyes you might like to email
Tony.Heyes@physics.org with your surname
and/or your comments.
You might like to look at a new web based surname profiler.
Currently the absolute web address for this page is http://web.aanet.com.au/tonyheyes/UKmaps/
Mozilla FireFox