Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Mr. Rogers Was Right

I am special. Apparently I'm the only Bella Stander in the whole U.S. of A., which makes me 1 in about 300 million. Here's how I found out for sure:

HowManyOfMe.com
LogoThere are:
0
people with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

According to the last census (which apparently didn't count me despite all the fun I had filling out the form), there were 1110 people with the surname Stander in the country;
8999 people with the first name of Bella. I think the second number will go up soon because there are lots of dogs named Bella these days (I knew of 4 in Charlottesville, VA, alone, from a harlequin Great Dane to a homely little black thing of very mixed parentage), and I've noticed that where dogs lead, kids soon follow.

Max and Hannah are popular names now, after being attached to several dogs of my acquaintance a few years ago. (Disclosure: My cat is Max; he also eats MaxCat food.) Bella, Max and Hannah were common in our (great-) grandparents' era too. My grandmother was Belle, called Bella, and there were any number of Max Standers 100 years ago. Though as I discovered to my frustration when researching family history, Max was a common Jewish nickname for a man whose middle name was Menachem or Mordechai--or most anything that began with "M." So there are some big question marks on the family tree.

Darling Husband shares his name with just one other person, though I'll bet that guy has a middle name, unlike DH. The Boy Wonder is much more common: there are 220 others with the same first and last names. They were bestowed upon him by his father, but after BW was born my father told me that his boyhood nickname was the same as BW's first name. I'll never know exactly why (I have my guesses)--another question mark for the tree.

Edit 12/26: Take the info at HowManyofMe.com with a BIG grain of salt. Per the comments, several people have discovered that they & their families don't exist. The Boy Wonder searched for the last name Rosewater, and supposedly there are zero people in the entire country who have it; whereas I found two in the Denver phone book. However, I still think I'm the one & only Bella Stander, as no one else comes up in Google & Yahoo! White Pages searches.

3 comments:

David said...

According to that site, I'm so special that I don't even exist!

Hmm. That might explain a few things.

RUminator said...

Well my name is so special that there are 0 people in the US with my last name, which will come as quite a surprise to the hundreds of them in the phone book. Hmmm...maybe this was based on a parallel universe census...

Anonymous said...

I share my name, however, my brother in law has the worst of it. He's John Stagliano. You'll have to google it to see with whom he shares the name though. ICK!

Kim Stagliano