Rose by another name goes extinct
A few days ago, I alerted a friend to the excellent news that her name, Shormishtha, was the 4,213,784th most common name in the world. Eight people, presumably including her, are called that. Of those, six are in India, with one each in Canada and the US.
I don’t necessarily believe these numbers. Well, maybe I do believe 4,213,784. Still, that’s not important.
What I was particularly intrigued by is that somebody has actually compiled information like this and made it available for public consumption on a website (https://forebears.io/). This is how I now possess the invaluable information that my surname is the 11,680th most common in the world, that my first name is 399th, and that there is one person in the Netherlands with my late maternal grandfather’s surname, which is 1,727,723rd most common. I actually know that person in the Netherlands.
She is married to my cousin. So anyway, I spent a happy half hour or so checking out various names and surnames. (You can too.) At some point, almost inevitably, I began wondering about names that might vanish.
Now, my late maternal grandfather had one son, my uncle. But let’s say he had none (this is a thought experiment, after all). In our family’s genealogical tree, that name would have ceased to exist with the death of my grandfather in 1990.
It would have been an ex-name. In our largely patrilineal world, most names are passed on via the males of the species—father to son. In fact, you could say most names live on via the males of the species.
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