OK, I don’t know if this is going to break down any of your brick walls, but if you are like me, it was fun to play with.
I started on Public Profiler Worldnames and entered my maiden name Gillespie.
This is the distribution of the name across the world. Well at least in the countries they are tracking. Below the map, I discover there are more Gillespie’s per million in Ireland in any other country.
So I click on Ireland in the map and see that they are concentrated in North Ireland and Scotland. This fits with my belief that they are from the Ulster Scots or Scotch Irish.
Clicking again on the dark blue area, I see:
Now I don’t think this helps me in my genealogy research all that much. This tells me where the names are most likely to come from, not where my ancestors come from. But I love maps. So what the heck — it was fun! 🙂
cluster genealogy 
LOVE this!! Thanks Anne!
a very nice tool to access – a uncommon name would work best I think;bust would depend again on number of researchers.ghita Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2012 12:37:05 +0000 To: darryldj@hotmail.com
Oh, I’ll definitely use this map on our maternal surname! It’s like the common Irish surname Kirwan, but it’s not that name, and it’s also more scattered in spelling: Kervin, Kerven, Kirvin, Kirven, Kerrivan, Curvin …. Maybe your suggestion will help with our hardest brick wall — we can’t yet trace our supposed first emigrant from Ireland. Thanks!
Yes, that was fun! Thanks for the inspiration! There’s a branch of the family that says we are from Scotland and the results that I got tends to support my theory that we came from Ireland.
Yes, this is fun! I have a very uncommon name in my ancestry and it confirmed that most people with that name are in belgium. Didn’t learn anything new, but it confirmed what I already knew and was fun to play with.
Very neat! I need to check it out!
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