One of the great things I love is maps, especially those that show the distribution of a surname over time and consider why that geographical spread occurred.

My favourite site, World Profiler is currently unavailable. For sometime it has been giving a security alert, although the site was quite safe. It seemed to be selective depending on what browser you were using – it did not like Chrome for example!

I wrote almost a year ago about the surname Magro Malosso and for that post I used both Public Profiler and Gens.info -you can read that post HERE

Distribution maps aid us to understand what the geographical spread of a surname might look like. I have shown the map for Orlando previously too, so thought that I would show the map results for the surname of Licata, which was the name of my paternal Grandmother. Licata is a place in Sicily, so there is likely some link with the place, although very often foundlings were given the name of the place they were found it.

Eventually it was considered that it created a stigma for a child that had been abandoned, so towns and villages then started giving surnames that were not already present in the area, which of course, made it just as obvious as previously. Whether there was a foundling in my family I don’t know. Before I generated the map, I did not consider that it would be a popular surname, well it is although not as popular as Orlando! It is especially popular in my part of Sicily, and that is determined by the dark pink colour.