Having written the earlier post about Burns Night (Burns Night Part 1), I realised that I had not explored the surname more fully. I don’t have time to create a significant post, but did want to share a few things with you, as I was quite surprised.

I headed to Forebears.io and looked at the distribution of the surname BURNS for 1881 – direct link to the data HERE

Distribution Map from Forebears.io for 1881 – Surname of BURNS

The map shows that in 1881 there were no instances of the surname anywhere but the United Kingdom. There are some anomalies here.

The data does refers to Great Britain which is England, Wales and Scotland. Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey are not the part of Great Britain or the UK, but they are Crown Dependencies.

The results show there were more that double instances of England than in Scotland.

There is some data for 1880, which is only for the United States, but if you look at the distribution map and click the actual map, it does populate each state – Check this out HERE

The site also provides some data for 1901, with only Ireland being shown. At this point, Ireland was one country.

There is no further historical data, what is available from the site is relative to the Census data. As you might expect by 2014, which is the other date that provides data, the distribution map shows the surname is more widespread.

Distribution Map from Forebears.io for 2014 – Surname of BURNS

The data for 2014 shows the distribution across the most incidences for the top 10 locations, and you can click the link to see more data

Looking at surname distribution is one of the elements of the Introduction to One-Name Studies course – The course has just started, but there are a few spaces left if you would like to join us, just click the link provided.