Combining historic interpretations of the Great Britain population with contemporary spatial analysis: The case of surnames

This study applies contemporary geospatial analysis to the 1881 Census of Great Britain to establish, through a process of inductive generalisation, the surname regions in 19^th century Britain. All surnames in the census were geo-referenced to the 662 Registration Districts listed. The districts´ surname compositions were compared using the Lasker distance calculation. The resulting similarity values, assigned to each district, were grouped according to Ward´s hierarchical clustering. By mapping the cluster allocations a clear regionality, characterised by a high spatial autocorrelation value, emerges that closely matches the historical attempts to establish the surname regions in 19^th Century Britain. As one of the first studies of this kind to utilise a complete population register for 1881, with results aligned to historical interpretations, one can think of the maps presented here as a baseline for the regionality of surnames in Great Britain, against which the effects of more recent migrations can be compared.