A recently published magazine included a cover CD (dated 1996) containing a claimed 42 million UK names, addresses & telephone numbers. The source of the data is not obvious, but would appear to be a compilation of mailing lists, with some extra data from electoral registers or phone books - it contains address entries with "no phone number available" that do not appear in local phone books, duplicate entries and also omits some known family members completely (in 1996 my mother had been at the same address for 50 years and was in the phone book, but does not appear in this listing). Having bought the magazine specially for the CD I was a bit disappointed to find a more easily searched version available on the Internet at 'www.192.com'. For non-UK citizens I should explain that this apparently odd name is bit of a cheeky rip-off as 192 is British Telecomm's Directory Enquiries telephone number and the Internet site is totally unrelated to them.
However, whatever use it may or may not be as a finding aid, it does provide an interesting view of the relative frequency of the various spellings of our name - in the following table there are three entries per surname firstly the number of individuals on the CD, secondly the number of families (obtained by summarising by postcode - the likely incidence of two families within about 20 houses is too insignificant to worry about) and lastly the percentage of the total families represented by that spelling.
As can be seen, we appear to have lost all the Crab spellings, which could possibly be regarded as the 'older' version. It would be interesting to see the equivalent statistics from other countries - you send them in, I'll publish them in future editions.
Spelling Individuals Families %age
-------- ----------- -------- ----
Crabbe 635 358 19
Crabb 2,205 1,256 66
Crab 0 0 0
Craib 349 211 11
Crabbs 3 2 0
Crabe 1 1 0
Crabbie 11 7 0
-------- ----------- -------- ----
Total 3,204 1,835
Subsequently this exercise has proved to be somewhat lacking in it's coverage - see page SIX for a more comprehensive survey of the Electoral Registers - nearly 5,000 people in total - all citizens of 18 & over are required by law to register though presumably there may still be some omissions if people were deliberately trying to hide. I am reliably informed via the GOONS mailing list that later editions of the www.192.com site contain less entries, not more.
This page last updated on 6th October 1998.