Would you consider someone with your same last name family?

Question

Would you consider someone with your same last name family? What if your last name was really rare? I went on facebook and found some people with my last name all around the world, would they be considered family? Maybe blood related somehow to?

Answer 1

If it's a rare name, then there's a strong possibility, but it might be a very distant relationship.

I have a rare name.  People from faraway states contacted me a few times over the years asking if we were related, but I didn't know until after I had done some genealogical research.  

I discovered we were related...but very distantly.  We're all descended from a single family that split up after the father died. They sold the plantation they inherited, and moved to three different regions of North America around 1810.  There are probably thousands of living descendants...but our last common ancestor lived almost 200 years ago.

Answer 2

Really really rare, maybe.

"Lee", no - Look at Robert E. Lee, late General, CSA, and Lee Kwon Yu, late Prime Minister of Singapore. (Chinese put their family name first.)

Ditto Smith, Miller, Carpenter, Fletcher, Fowler, Cook, Baker . . .   Peterson, Johnson, Thomason . . .  alhough they don't have any Chinese "Cousins" the way Marse Robert does.

Answer 3

There's a very very slight chance you could be related to some of them, but a much bigger chance that you're not related. Think of the last name Smith. In my grade, there are 4 kids with that last name. None are related. I doubt that those people on facebook are related to you.

Answer 4

I always thought my maiden name was really rare because my great-grandfather changed the spelling on it about 100 years ago. Then the age of the internet arrived and I not only found out there are about 10,000 in North America with that name, but it's really common in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Ironically, there's a woman with exactly my name (and my first name isn't common, either) who lives in Florida. None of these people are related to me, but apparently their grandparents got creative on spelling, too. The name doesn't exist anywhere in Europe, but it exists in North America...and none of them are related to my great-grandfather.

You might think it's really cool to find people with the same name as yours. I think it is, too. But don't fall into the trap of assuming you're related to them. Family comes from more than your name.

Answer 5

Not really

Answer 6

not me- if i were to seach for my last name in family history- it would end at me and my brother- my dad was adopted and we never changed our last names back to what our 'blood' last name is.

Answer 7

Consider them for what?

Answer 8

absolutely not and that doesnt necessarily mean they're family

Answer 9

I have one family line that is derived from a specific place in England, and so far, all the 3200 people on that tree are traced to there. And I have found no one holding the surname that originated elsewhere.

As for all the other surnames in my research, especially the occupation names, it would be presumptuous to assume any relationship without a clear line of documentation.

Surnames are recent creations; people get adopted or have adopted names, so the trick is to find the paperwork that proves it.

Answer 10

No you cannot consider someone with the same surname as your family or necessarily remotely related to you, unless you take into consideration that the whole human race is related if you can go back 100,000 years.  Not everybody with the same surname comes from the same root person of that surname.  

Surnames were not taken by Europeans until the last melennium.  They were based on a)being the son of someone b)their occupation c)where they lived d)some characateristic about them

When they got through legitimate sons of the same man could have wound up with a different surname and still they could each have shared their surname with others with whom they were not related.