Not everyone who shares a surname is related… some may have just shared the same local.
Remeber the question that usually stumped us as kids? A flipped coin has a 50-50 chance of being heads or tails. If heads comes up, what are the odds of it being tails on the next toss? Most children can't seem to resist saying that it will be tails, but of course half the time it won't be.
This came to mind recently when I heard someone deplore that the family he was researching had such a common name, what Dauzat and Mathiot used to term un nom très répandu. If, like me, you have a surname that's uncommon in this part of Canada, it's not necessary to carry out the exercise I'm about to outline. But if you are about to embark on sorting out your MacDonalds or Boudreaus, your Campbells or Smiths, it may not be a bad idea to see what the mathematics of your project will be.
Bear in mind that not everyone who shares a surname is necessarily biologically related. I doubt all Murphys derive from one long-ago sea raider. Or that the Parsons go back to one ancient parish in western England. And even if they did... Years ago, families often got their name from the inn sign on the local. Say it featured a steer. John who kept the inn was John Bull. The stableman was called Will Bull, and the porter was known as Richard Bull. If they all had descendants who traced their families back to that English village, people will assume they were related, but they may have been totally unrelated.
As a matter of fact, not even all Punches share a common ancestor-we come in Irish, English and German editions, for starters. Try to pin down the several Martin families in Atlantic Canada to a common country of origin and you'll see my point. If you can't confine bearers of a surname to a place of origin, imagine the odds of finding that they are biologically related without establishing probability on the basis of Y-chromosome DNA testing of hundreds of people. Obtaining consent and participation, plus the cost, renders that an unlikely route to take.
How can you find out whether you are taking on mission impossible if you decide to establish the relationship of the people who share your surname? A very useful resource is the 1901 and 1911 census returns found online at automatedgenealogy.com. Here you can enter a surname by province and get a total number of entries.
Be sure to merge any closely related or misspelled versions to get a complete total, or you may miss a family entirely. I entered "MacLeod" in New Brunswick. The answer: there were none, nada, zero! I knew that was wrong. Then I found 10 possible variants of the name, merged them and found there were 1,280 people bearing some variation of the name in New Brunswick in 1901.
Don't forget that many French names have been anglicized-LeBlanc became White; Aucoin, Wedge; Lenoir, Black. The O's were sometimes dropped from Irish names; O'Toole turns up as Twohill, O'Sullivan may simply be Sullivan. Some German names appear in records in both German and English forms, depending on the language of the clerk: Koch became Cook; Eisenhauer, Isenor; Berghaus, Barkhouse.
For Newfoundland and Labrador, not part of Canada a century ago, there's a carefully compiled reference to help tally surnames. In 1955, using the Official List of Electors, Dr. E. R. Seary provided a list of the 816 most common names in his province. In his book, Family Names of the Island of Newfoundland, he tells us that the top five surnames are, in order, White, Parsons, Smith, Power and Walsh.
Just to show how different the surnames of two provinces in this region can be, compare those to the top five I counted in the 1864/1877 birth registrations in Nova Scotia: M(a)cDonald, Smith, McNeil(l), M(a)cLean, and M(a)cLeod.
Of course, it's likely to be less difficult to sort out the McLeans in Newfoundland than in Nova Scotia, and vice versa for the Parsons.
So, ask yourself early on, "What are the odds?"