This is a fascinating project developed by OriginsInfo, Experian and Geowise.

It provides a wealth of information about the geography and spread of names, both Family Names and Personal Names across the globe.  Below is details from mapyourname.com that details how they have done this.

“To create this website we have examined the names of 360,000,000 people currently alive in the United States, Australia and most of Western Europe. For almost all of these people Mapyourname will reveal the parts of the world from which their personal and family names originate.

For the 60,000 most common family names Mapyourname will show their spread not just at country level but right down to the level of individual regions. From these maps most of you should be able to pinpoint the ancestral heartland of your name, and your friends’ and colleagues’ names, the place where your distant blood relations live, the location of your genetic home.”

Excellent work that I can quite easily spend hours on looking around at where my friends and colleagues names are most popular.

This is another amazing visualization using the Walmart data, it started with flowingdata doing a cool visualization, its then morphed into various others, the most recent and also pretty spectacular from MichaelVandaniker and shows the intensity of the spread in the same way as a wildfire spreads.

Amazing work…

Zip Level Mashup New York

 

Various levels of geography can be incorporated, ZipCode, Census Tracts, Street Addresses, Counties, DMA, MSA and States.

 

 

 Detailed HeatMapping for the Chicago DMA, at Zip Level