Past studies permitting the mapping of surnames in Britain are limited. Guppy (1890) published data on the distribution in Great Britain of the surnames of land-owning farmers, whom he considered to be the geographically most stable element in the society. Unfortunately Guppy only recorded part of the data – the frequency of surnames in the counties in which they reached or exceeded 7 per thousand; thus data on even the most common surnames were lacking for some counties.

Through the cooperation of the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys of the Registrar General's office, it has been possible to acquire, edit and computerize an alphabetically arranged list of the number of persons of each of a selected list of surnames married in each registration district of England and Wales in the first three months of 1975. Some analyses of these data have been undertaken (Lasker, 1983; Mascie- Taylor and Lasker, 1984; G. W. Lasker and C. G. N. Mascie-Taylor, in preparation). We here add maps and diagrams of the geographic distributions of these surnames.

Marriage records are generally preferable for distribution studies to birth or death records because the population sampled by marriage records is the adult breeding population of interest in human population genetics, whereas some individuals listed in birth and death records never lived to enter the breeding population. Although most individuals listed in the marriage records were resident in the district where the marriage was registered, there are some exceptions, especially among the bridegrooms.